THE  LIBRARY  OF  THE 

UNIVERSITY  OF 

NORTH  CAROLINA 


FROM  THE  BOOKS  OF 

WILLIAM  P.  JACOCKS,  M.D. 

CLASS  OF  1904 
FRIEND  OF  THE  LIBRARY 


CB 
H5fc3m 


FROM  SHAKESPEARE  TO  O.  HENRY 


FROM    SHAKESPEARE 
TO  O.  HENRY 

STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 


BY 

S.  P.  B.  MAIS 

Author  oj 
"A  Public  School  in  War  Time' 


a 


NEW  YORK 

DODD,   MEAD  AND  COMPANY 


PRINTED    IN   GREAT   BRITAIN   BY  THE   RIVERSIDE   PRESS   LIMITED 
EDINBURGH 


TO 

MY  WIFE 


r 

to 

<*) 


CONTENTS 

I.  SHAKESPEARE 

II.  THE  EIGHTEENTH   CENTURY 

III.  SOME  MODERN  POETS 

IV.  SOME  MORE  MODERN  POETS 
V.  THE  MODERN  NOVEL 

VI.  MODERN  DRAMA 
VII.  SAMUEL  BUTLER 
VIII.  RICHARD  MIDDLETON 
IX.  THE  GENIUS  OF  JOHN  MASEFIELD 
X.  RUPERT  BROOKE 

XI.  THE  POETRY  OF  THOMAS  HARDY 
XII.  O.  HENRY    .... 


PAOE 

13 

46 

59 

81 

135 

161 

180 

223 

235 

257 

279 

296 


/  desire  to  thank  the  editors  of  "  The 
Nineteenth  Century,"  "The  Fortnightly 
Review"  "  The  Journal  of  Education" 
and  "The  Parents'  Review"  for  permis- 
sion to  reprint  here  six  of  the  following 
essays.  The  remainder  are  now  published 
for  the  first  time. 


ii 


SHAKESPEARE 


OF  late  we  have  regarded  Shakespeare,  so  far 
as  we  have  regarded  him  at  all,  solely  as  a 
Patriot  and  a  War-Poet,  and  by  so  doing- 
have  run  the  risk  of  forgetting  altogether  his  claim 
to  be  the  greatest  dramatist  of  our  own  if  not  of  all 
nations ;  it  is  perhaps  just  as  well  that  the  Tercen- 
tenary of  his  death  should  fall  in  war  time,  for  it  will 
tend  to  bring  us  back  to  our  attitude  of  reverence  and 
never-ceasing  gratitude  for  all  that  he  has  done  for  us. 
It  is  also  time  to  readjust  our  point  of  view  regarding 
his  life  and  work  in  the  light  of  what  recent  criticism 
has  done  in  the  way  of  showing  us  the  true  Shakespeare. 
There  has  never  been  an  age  so  rich  or  so  diverse  in 
Shakespearean  criticism  as  our  own  :  we  have  been 
able,  in  a  more  unbiassed  maimer  than  our  fathers,  to 
glean  what  there  was  of  lasting  value  in  the  pages  of 
Dryden,  Johnson,  Coleridge,  Lamb  and  Hazlitt ;  added 
to  this  there  has  been  the  never  sufficiently  to  be  praised 
life  study  of  Sir  Sidney  Lee,  and  the  fact  that  we  are 
somehow  more  honest  or  more  inspired  than  our 
ancestors.  Whatever  the  cause,  there  can  be  no  doubt 
that  the  studies  of  Brandes,  Ten  Brink,  Taine,  Raleigh, 
Bradley,  Frank  Harris,  Masefleld  and  Dowden  have 
opened  up  new  roads  of  thought,  each  of  them  different 
from  the  other,  but  each  converging  on  the  one  end  we 
would  all  attain,  the  heart  of  Shakespeare. 

We  recognise  now,  for  instance,  that  Wordsworth 
was  far  more  of  a  seer  than  Browning,   and   more 

13 


14  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

probably  right  when  he  suggested  that  in  the  Sonnets 
we  have  the  real  living  Shakespeare  :  "  with  this  key 
Shakespeare  unlocked  his  heart."  The  theory  that  we 
know  little  or  nothing  of  the  dramatist's  own  life  *  or 
point  of  view  is  exploded,  we  may  hope,  for  ever  :  the 
truth  is  that  we  know  more,  not  less,  about  the  actual 
details  of  his  life  than  we  do  about  any  other  dramatist 
of  his  time,  owing  to  the  indefatigable  energy  of  Sir 
Sidney  Lee,  Professor  Wallace  and  others  ;  and,  as 
Bagehot  says,  Shakespeare  is,  after  all,  his  own 
biographer.  Surely  no  man  could  desire  a  better 
Boswell.  As  it  was  one  of  Shakespeare's  most  notable 
gifts  to  be  able  to  make  a  fictitious  character  live  more 
really  than  many  people  with  whom  we  have  been 
intimately  connected  all  our  lives,  so  when  he  comes  to 
portray  his  own  idiosyncrasies  we  find  that  we  know 
Shakespeare  better  almost  than  anybody  else  in  the 
whole  world.  It  has  been  said,  of  course,  that  it  is  the 
business  of  the  dramatist  to  treat  his  art  objectively, 
to  stand  right  outside  it  and  so  far  to  obliterate  his  own 
point  of  view  as  to  be  able  to  step  into  the  very  body 
and  soul  of  his  dramatis  personce  and,  for  the  time  being, 
to  become  them  :  to  see  life  from  their  particular  niche 
and  to  utter  sentiments  (which  may  be  totally  opposed 
to  his  own)  which  fit  their  character.  This  is  all  quite 
true  and  sound  criticism,  but  when  Homer  nods,  when 
the  character  for  some  inexplicable  reason  gratuitously 
emphasises  points  in  his  character  which  rather  tend  to 
retard  than  to  develop  the  action,  we  may  justifiably 
begin  to  think  that  at  these  times  the  personality  of  the 
author  is  unconsciously  obtruding  itself  and  is,  in  a 
word,  his  own  temperament  giving  voice  to  its  likes  and 
dislikes. 

1  Sir  George  Greenwood's  theory  that  Shakespeare  the  actor  and 
"Shakespeare"  the  playwright  were  two  different  men  does  not  come 
within  the  scope  of  this  paper,  but  cannot  be  neglected. 


SHAKESPEARE  15 

Again,  when  a  dramatist  returns  time  after  time  to 
the  same  peculiarities  in  his  major  creations,  it  is  obvious 
that  he  is  at  any  rate  interested  in  those  peculiarities, 
either  because  they  are  his  own  obsessions  or  are 
possessed  by  his  most  intimate  friends.  No  man  can 
depict  what  he  fails  to  understand,  nor  does  he  usually 
attempt  to  draw  what  never  interests  him;  Shakespeare, 
for  instance,  nowhere  gives  us  a  living  portrait  of  the 
zealous  Puritan  fanatic  reformer,  or  the  shopkeeping, 
middle-class  citizen  :  neither  type  interested  him. 

Two  types  alone  stand  out  among  his  delineations  of 
men  :  as  Doctor  Johnson  shrewdly  remarks,  Shake- 
speare has  no  heroes  ;  his  best  pictures  of  men  are 
those  which  depict  them  as  creatures  of  obvious  human 
failings  like  unto  ourselves,  and  they  stand  out,  very 
clear-cut,  in  two  main  groups. 

First  there  is  the  group  which  we  identify  as  like  in 
nearly  all  points  to  Shakespeare  himself — the  Hamlet, 
Biron,  Vincentio,  Orsino,  Prospero,  Jaques,  Macbeth, 
Posthumus,  Richard  the  Second  type.  These  men  are 
amazingly  alike  even  when,  by  all  the  laws  of  drama, 
they  ought  not  to  be.  They  all  love  solitude,  are  far 
too  much  given  to  introspection  and  thinking  too  pre- 
cisely on  the  event,  it  is  their  great  failing  that  their 
native  hue  of  resolution  is  sicklied  o'er  by  the  pale  cast 
of  thought,  they  all  find  solace  in  music,  they  are  gentle, 
almost  too  gentle,  "  too  full  of  the  milk  of  human 
kindness,"  in  all  of  them  their  imaginative  faculty  is 
developed  at  the  expense  of  all  their  other  faculties. 
They  may,  in  some  cases,  describe  themselves  as  "  plain, 
blunt  men,"  but  as  a  matter  of  fact  they  delude  them- 
selves when  they  say  so  :  the  truth  is  that  they  are  all 
poets ;  they  never  speak  anything  but  the  purest 
poetry ;  they  are  simply  Shakespeare,  Shakespeare 
himself  speaking  through  the  lips  of  these  kings  and 


16  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

princes  and  dukes,  Shakespeare  the  gentle,  the  passion- 
ate, the  irresolute.  After  all,  if  we  take  Leonardo  da 
Vinci's  opinion  to  be  worth  anything,  we  should  expect 
this.  *l  For  the  form,"  he  says,  "  we  go  to  Nature  and 
use  our  observations,  for  the  soul  we  look  into  our  own 
hearts  and  paint  ourselves." 

This  it  is  that  seems  to  me  to  account  for  Shake- 
speare's failure  when  we  begin  to  analyse  his  depiction 
of  the  second  broad  group — the  men  of  action.  For 
who  are  Shakespeare's  men  of  action  ? 

Othello  ?  He  begins  as  man  of  action  and  ends  as 
a  man  of  action,  but  in  the  middle  of  the  play  he  is  the 
poet,  imaginative,  given  to  much  thinking  (it  is  almost 
a  sine  qua  non  that  our  men  of  action  should  not  be  over- 
burdened with  intellect ;  it  is  just  because  they  don't 
waste  time  in  overmuch  thinking  that  we  admire  them 
so),  an  abominably  bad  judge  of  character  (where  your 
man  of  action  is  almost  infallible),  suspicious  to  an 
extraordinary  degree.     He  talks  too  much. 

Macbeth  ?  He  is  superstitious,  lily-livered  in  his 
fear  of  blood,  more  a  poet,  and  far  more  sensitive  of 
soul  than  Othello. 

Henry  the  Fifth  ?  As  a  king  he  may  compel  admira- 
tion, but  as  a  man  he  is  almost  beneath  contempt ;  he 
is  a  low,  common  cad  who  deserts  his  friends,  butchers 
his  enemies  and  makes  love  like  a  savage. 

Hotspur  ?  His  masterpiece  of  the  man  of  action  is 
a  medley  of  contrarieties,  who  hates  w'  mincing  poetry  " 
and  yet  employs  it  ad  nauseam,  losing  himself  in  mis- 
timed philosophic  reflection  when  he  ought  to  be  the 
brave,  blunt  hero. 

Richard  the  Second  ?  Heavens,  no !  Falcon- 
bridge  ?  He  is  slavishly  copied  from  The  Troublesome 
Raigne. 

Search  the  plays  through  and  through  and  you  will 


SHAKESPEARE  17 

find  that  Shakespeare  mars  in  some  particular  all  his 
men  of  action.  The  truth  is  that  he  is  not  sufficiently 
interested  in  them  to  understand  them.  How  other- 
wise can  we  explain  the  fact  that  he  never  took  the 
trouble  to  depict  a  Raleigh,  a  Hawkins,  a  Frobisher,  a 
Drake  or  a  Sir  Philip  Sidney  ?  He  had  models  enough 
near  at  hand  ;  he  must  have  come  into  intimate  con- 
tact with  men  of  this  famous  breed  ;  he  nowhere 
portrays  them  any  more  than  he  portrays  the  zealous 
Puritan  or  the  middle-class  shopkeeper.  He  had 
nothing  in  common  with  them.  He  had,  truly,  the 
finest  experiencing  nature  ever  given  to  man  ;  his  mind 
was  like  a  highly  sensitive  photographic  plate.  Conse- 
quently, he  has  immortalised  types  which  will  live  for 
ever  in  tragedy  and  comedy.  His  Falstaff,  about 
whom  it  has  been  said  that  if  anyone  were  to  garner  up 
all  the  humour  and  gaiety  of  his  entire  life  it  would 
amount  to  about  the  worth  of  one  sentence  of  the 
immortal  knight ;  his  Nurse  in  Romeo  and  Juliet,  who 
remains  ever  fresh  when  all  our  real  nurses  are  for- 
gotten ;  his  Dogberry,  who  contains  the  essence  of  all 
the  policemen  we  have  had  the  misfortune  to  know  ; 
his  Shallow,  whose  humour  Masefield  compares  to  an 
apple-loft  in  some  old  barn  where  the  apples  of  last  year 
lie  sweet  in  the  straw — all  these  are  in  the  world's  great 
portrait  gallery.  Yet  it  must  not  be  forgotten  that,  in 
spite  of  these,  Shakespeare  had  his  limitations,  and  this 
failure  to  depict  the  man  of  action  was  one  of  the  most 
noticeable.  He  seems  himself  to  have  been  a  man 
obsessed  with  a  horror  of  bloodshed.  He  can  never 
quite  rise  to  an  adequate  description  of  courage — as 
Frank  Harris  says,  when  we  want  to  see  this  side  of 
life  faithfully  rendered  we  have  to  turn  to  Bunyan  : 
Valiant-for-Truth,  with  his  ww  I  fought  till  my  sword  did 
cleave  to  my  hand  and  when  they  were  joined  together 


18  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

as  if  a  sword  grew  out  of  my  arm,  and  when  the  blood 
ran  through  my  fingers,  then  I  fought  with  most 
courage,"  is  quite  beyond  the  scope  of  Shakespeare. 

But,  as  Professor  Saintsbury  says  in  his  Peace  of  the 
Avgustans,  "  it  is  not  a  sin  for  a  potato  not  to  be  a  peach 
or  not  to  be  sorry  because  it  is  one  "  :  it  is  not  Shake- 
speare's fault  if  he  left  us  no  picture  of  the  modern 
Public  School  boy  or  drew  the  happy  warrior  less 
happily  than  Wordsworth ;  what  is  sinful  is  for  us 
to  pretend  that  he  did  what  he  did  not  do.  "  For 
the  soul  we  look  into  our  own  hearts  and  paint 
ourselves." 

So  when  Shakespeare  came  to  portray  womanhood  I 
believe  he  painted  those  whom  he  knew,  and  sometimes 
idealised  them  to  such  a  degree  that  they  became  lifeless 
abstractions. 

Hazlitt's  dictum  that  "  Shakespeare's  heroines 
(though  they  have  been  found  fault  with  as  insipid)  are 
the  finest  in  the  world, ' '  like  most  of  Hazlitt's  judgments, 
hits  the  nail  on  the  head. 

When  suddenly  we  are  asked  to  pick  out  our  favourite 
heroines  in  fiction  we  are  hard  put  to  it  to  think  of  any 
with  whom  we  would  willingly  spend  our  days.  Scott 
once,  in  Jeanie  Deans,  painted  a  real  live  girl,  Meredith 
again  and  again  ;  but  few  other  writers  have  succeeded 
in  pleasing  the  fastidious  male.  Shakespeare  certainly 
has  left  the  best  we  know,  but  with  many  even  of  his  we 
are  prone  to  find  fault. 

Who,  for  instance,  would  willingly  marry  an  Ophelia  ? 
She  is  scarcely  more  than  a  puppet.  There  are  times 
when  we  are  so  tortured  in  Othello  that  we  long  for  any 
girl  of  our  acquaintance  to  change  places  for  half-an- 
hour  with  Desdemona.  There  simply  would  have  been 
no  tragedy  had  a  flesh-and- blood  girl  been  in  her  situa- 
tion :     it    is    Desdemona's    dumbness,    Desdemona's 


SHAKESPEARE  19 

etherial  qualities  that  allow  a  tragedy  which  strains  the 
probabilities  almost  to  breaking-point. 

In  Cordelia,  however,  Shakespeare  rises  to  his 
highest ;  though  she  speaks  barely  a  hundred  lines  she 
lives  for  us  for  ever  ;  her  foolish  obstinacy,  her  show  of 
temper  as  she  leaves  her  sisters,  her  amazing  filial 
devotion,  all  endear  her  to  us,  so  that  she  stands  out  far 
above  all  the  other  women  whom  Shakespeare  depicted. 
The  truth  is  that  Shakespeare  was  always  painting  ideal 
portraits  of  girls  :  in  Rosalind,  in  Portia,  in  Beatrice, 
in  Juliet.  Again  and  again  we  have  the  same  sprightly, 
witty,  loose-talking,  boyish  girl  who  is  like  no  one  we 
ever  met,  but  in  some  points  like  the  girl  of  our  dreams. 

Occasionally  we  get  a  picture  of  a  shrew,  as  in  Adriana, 
Katherine,  or  Constance  (in  the  earlier  scenes),  and 
from  hints  that  Shakespeare  drops  from  time  to  time 
we  may  well  believe  that  he  was  here  depicting  that 
unfortunate  Anne  Hathaway,  the  wife  who  was  eight 
years  older  than  her  husband,  to  whom  the  second-best 
bed  was  his  last  bequest.     In  Volumnia,  that  splendid 
Roman  matron,  he  has  paid  a  grand  tribute  to  mothers, 
and  it  is  quite  on  the  cards  that  in  the  bloodless  abstrac- 
tions with  which  he  occupied  himself  in  his  closing  years, 
in  Perdita,  Marina  and  Miranda,  he  may  well  have  had 
in  mind  his  daughter  Judith.     But  it  none  the  less 
remains  true  that  he  never  succeeds  in  painting  any 
type  of  womanhood  so  successfully  again  as  he  did  in 
Cleopatra.     No  other  woman  in  Shakespeare  is  worthy 
to  compare  with  her ;    she  is  astoundingly  alive  and 
real.     She  has  the  power  of  making  us  feel  that  had 
we  been  Antony  we  should  have  done  what  Antony 
did,  and   in   rereading  the  play  it  seems  impossible 
to  imagine  that  Shakespeare  drew  entirely  from  his 
imagination    when    he   conceived    such    a   character. 
Frank  Harris's  theory  that  Cleopatra  and  Cressida  are 


20  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

both  portraits  of  the  Dark  Lady  of  the  Sonnets,  that 
Shakespeare's  great  tragedy  was  his  unbridled  passion 
for  this  lady,  call  her  Mary  Fitton  or  whom  you  will,  is 
at  least  plausible,  and  becomes  more  and  more  likely  as 
we  follow  up  the  threads  of  his  argument. 

That  Shakespeare  personally  experienced  deep  suffer- 
ing of  some  sort  seems  to  be  obvious  ;  it  is  inconceivable 
that  he  should  have  written  Hamlet,  Lear,  Macbeth  and 
Othello  had  he  not  himself  been  in  the  depths  ;  what 
that  experience  was  we  cannot  now  know  for  certain, 
but,  judging  from  what  we  do  know  of  him,  it  appears 
more  likely  to  have  been  an  agony  of  love,  of  treachery 
and  baseness  in  love  than  anything  else.  The  story  of 
the  friend  being  deputed  to  make  love  to  the  girl  for 
the  hero  does  not  occur,  be  it  remembered,  only  in  the 
Sonnets  ;  we  have  the  same  story  retold  in  Much  Ado 
About  Nothing  and  in  Twelfth  Night.  It  is  an  absurd 
story  for  a  dramatist  so  versatile  as  Shakespeare  to 
harp  on,  but  he  somehow  cannot  get  away  from  it,  as  he 
would  not,  were  he  recalling  an  episode  in  his  own  life. 
When  we  recollect  how  often  Shakespeare  inveighs 
against  the  sin  of  ingratitude,  to  him  obviously  the 
worst  offence  imaginable,  it  lends  colour  all  the  more 
strongly  to  the  theory  that  Shakespeare  sent  the  young 
Herbert  to  plead  his  cause  with  Mary  Fitton,  only  to 
discover  that  she  succumbed  to  the  attractiveness  of 
the  friend  and  betrayed  Shakespeare  by  giving  herself 
to  his  friend. 

Whatever  the  truth  of  this  may  be,  there  is  at  least 
no  doubt  that  Shakespeare  was  more  successful  in  his 
portraiture  of  women  when  he  was  painting  the  coquette, 
the  wanton  Cleopatra  (whom  he  seemed  to  know  right 
down  to  the  utmost  depths)  than  he  was  in  any  other 
type  of  womanhood  at  all.  Even  Ruskin  noticed  that 
nearly  all  Shakespeare's  women  were  faultless,  but  he 


SHAKESPEARE  21 

does  not  conclude,  therefore,  as  we  do,  that  they  were, 
for  this  very  reason,  unhuman  and  untrue  to  life. 


II 

It  has  been  said  that  Shakespeare  spent  his  life  in  two 
places  :  in  the  Court,  mingling  with  the  young  gallants 
who  had  taken  him  up  and  found  his  witty,  sunny  dis- 
position to  their  liking ;  and  in  the  taverns,  with  Ben 
Jonson  and  Marlowe,  where  he  met  the  Bardolphs, 
Fal staffs  and  Quickly s  of  life.  The  middle  of  humanity 
he  never  knew,  but  only  the  extremes.  This  may  be 
due  to  all  sorts  of  reasons ;  one  certainly  was  that  he 
was  inherently  an  aristocrat ;  by  a  strange  paradoxical 
irony,  apparently  he  was  also  a  snob.  Somehow  in  the 
light  of  this  it  is  easier  to  understand  the  way  in  which 
Mary  Fitton  treated  him,  "  now  she  would  and  now  she 
wouldn't " — always  keeping  him  on  the  tenterhooks 
alternately  of  hope  and  despair,  until  she  finally  married 
for  the  second  time  and  left  London  for  ever.  Genius 
was  ever  unhappy  in  its  relations  with  the  opposite  sex, 
and  it  appears  unlikely  that  Shakespeare  was  an  excep- 
tion to  a  rule  which  has  scarcely  ever  been  broken, 
except  in  the  case  of  the  Brownings. 

It  has  been  the  fashion  for  many  years  now  to  extol 
Shakespeare's  sense  of  humour  as  almost  the  most 
perfectly  developed  which  we  possess ;  but  Doctor 
Johnson  noticed  what  many  of  us  nowadays  feel :  that 
many  of  his  so-called  comic  scenes  are  intolerably  dull, 
owing  to  the  eternal  playing  upon  words  in  which  the 
characters  indulge.  Just  as  Euphuism  was  a  passing 
phase,  a  fashion  of  the  moment,  so  this  habit  of  pun- 
ning, so  dear  to  the  heart  of  Shakespeare,  once  it 
reaches  its  zenith  in  Sidney  Smith,  ceases  to  have 
any  claim  upon  our  attention  :  it  has  become  the  very 


22  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

lowest  form  of  wit — cheap,  vulgar,  relegated  to  the  less 
desirable  type  of  music-hall.  No  fashion  changes  more 
quickly  than  the  fashion  of  fun,  the  criterion  of  what  is 
or  what  is  not  humorous  ;  it  is  this  that  so  surprises  us 
in  Johnson's  other  statement  when  he  says  that  in  his 
comic  scenes  Shakespeare  seems  to  produce  without 
labour  what  no  labour  can  improve ;  Hazlitt  strikes  a 
truer  note  when  he  says  that  we  prefer  Shakespearean 
tragedy  to  Shakespearean  comedy  for  the  simple  reason 
that  tragedy  is  better  than  comedy.  Nothing,  for 
instance,  could  be  more  tedious  or  more  wooden  to 
modern  ears  than  the  opening  scene  of  Romeo  and 
Juliet,  with  its  silly  talk  about  "  choler,"  "  collier  "  and 
"  collar."  It  is  now  almost  painful  to  have  to  attri- 
bute such  drivel  to  the  pen  that  created  Sir  Andrew 
Aguecheek,  Sir  Toby  Belch  and  Bottom. 

Shakespeare's  failures  in  the  world  of  humour  are 
more  noticeable  than  any  other  man's,  for  the  simple 
reason  that  he  was  more  richly  endowed  with  the 
precious  gift  than  any  other  man ;  as  Meredith  truly 
points  out,  from  Mother  Earth 

Came  the  honeyed  corner  of  his  lips, 

The  conquering  smile  wherein  his  spirit  sails 

Calm  as  the  God  who  the  white  sea-wave  whips, 
Yet  full  of  speech  and  intershifting  tales, 

Close  mirrors  of  us  :  thence  had  he  the  laugh 
We  feel  is  hers. 

There  was  in  his  life  a  summer  time  when  his  innate 
capacity  for  sunny  gaiety  came  to  full  expression  in  the 
golden  comedies  of  Twelfth  Night,  A  Midsummer  NighVs 
Dream  and  As  You  Like  It. 

How  different  is  his  success  in  the  ever-famous  Nurse 
and  in  Bully  Bottom  and  their  likes,  all  of  whom  he 
saw  with  loving  observation,  from  his  pictures  of  men 


SHAKESPEARE  23 

of  action  :  very  rarely  does  his  humour  become  sar- 
donic or  contemptuous  :  rather  is  it  closely  allied  with 
Meredith's  Comic  Spirit — sympathetic,  harmless  and 
beautiful  as  summer  lightning.  As  Meredith  says  of 
him  : 

Shakespeare  is  a  well-spring  of  characters  which  are 
saturated  with  the  Comic  Spirit ;  with  more  of  what  we  call 
blood-life  than  is  to  be  found  anywhere  else  :  and  they  are  of 
this  world,  but  they  are  of  the  world  enlarged  to  our  embrace 
by  imagination  and  by  great  poetic  imagination. 

So  much  for  the  particular.  But  it  is  when  Meredith 
generalises  on  the  Comic  Spirit  that  he  gives  us  so  true 
a  picture  of  Shakespearean  humour. 

It  has  the  sage's  brows,  and  the  sunny  malice  of  a  faun 
lurks  at  the  corners  of  the  half-closed  lips  drawn  in  an  idle 
wariness  of  half-tension.  It  shows  sunlight  of  the  mind, 
mental  richness  rather  than  noisy  enormity.  Its  common 
aspect  is  one  of  unsolicitous  observation,  as  if  surveying  a  full 
field  and  having  leisure  to  dart  on  its  chosen  morsels,  without 
any  fluttering  eagerness.  Men's  future  upon  earth  does  not 
attract  it ;  their  honesty  and  shapeliness  in  the  present  does  : 
and  whenever  they  wax  out  of  proportion,  overblown,  affected, 
pretentious,  bombastical,  hypocritical,  pedantic,  fantastically 
delicate  ;  whenever  it  sees  them  self-deceived  or  hoodwinked, 
given  to  run  riot  in  idolatries,  drifting  into  vanities,  congre- 
gating in  absurdities,  planning  short-sightedly,  plotting 
dementedly ;  whenever  they  are  at  variance  with  their  pro- 
fessions and  violate  the  unwritten  laws  binding  them  in 
consideration  one  to  another;  whenever  they  offend  sound 
reason,  fair  justice :  are  false  in  humility,  or  mixed  with 
conceit,  individually  or  in  the  bulk — the  Spirit  overhead  will 
look  humanely  malign  and  cast  an  oblique  light  on  them, 
followed  by  volleys  of  silvery  laughter. 

This  so  exactly  and  so  perfectly  describes  Shake- 
speare's humour  that  to  add  or  subtract  a  word  is 
only  to  spoil  a  consummately  exact  picture.     It  leaves 


24  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

nothing  to  be  said.     Every  iota  of  this  criticism  applies 
with  wonderful  exactness  to  all  his  finest  comic  scenes. 


Ill 

We  should  have  thought,  from  the  fact  that  Shake- 
speare must  have  met  many  hundreds  of  boys  on  the 
stage,  that  he  would  have  left  us  one  deathless  portrait 
at  least  of  the  human  boy,  but  by  a  strange  paradox 
he  has  left  no  picture  of  the  living  boy  we  know.  All 
Shakespeare's  boy  characters  are  precocious  and  almost 
girlish  in  their  ways.  Arthur  is  far  the  best  of  them, 
and  may  well  stand  as  a  type  for  all  the  others.  There 
is  no  question  of  his  being  alive  :  he  holds  a  very  dear 
place  in  our  hearts  among  the  gallery  of  Shakespeare's 
most  successful  characters,  but  he  is  scarcely  the  boy 
as  we  know  him  ;  he  is  all  angelic  love,  a  woman-child 
in  his  unselfish  sympathy,  exceedingly  tender  and  sweet 
of  heart,  almost  perfect  and  yet  quite  natural,  never 
mawkish  or  sentimental ;  it  is  a  wonderful  creation, 
tear-compelling  in  his  pathetic  helplessness,  just  as  are 
the  prattling  Princes  or  Macduff's  son. 

So  then  we  see,  whether  we  are  discussing  Shake- 
speare's heroes,  heroines,  humour  or  boy  characters, 
broadly  defined  some  of  his  own  peculiar  idiosyncrasies  : 
his  gentle,  forgiving,  almost  feminine  mind  stands  out 
at  every  phase  of  his  life's  journey  and  betrays  him  to 
us.  It  remains  for  us  to  fill  in  the  portrait  by  noting  in 
a  careful  rereading  what  other  qualities  he  seems  to 
place  in  the  category  of  good  or  bad. 

First  and  by  far  the  most  noticeable  is  his  love  of 
music ;  all  his  favourite  characters,  from  Orsino  to 
Cleopatra,  call  for  music  on  the  slightest  pretext ;  he 
even  goes  out  of  his  way  to  condemn  the  man  who  has 
no  music  in  his  soul,  though  we  know  well  enough  how 


SHAKESPEARE  25 

false  a  judgment  that  is.  It  is  on  a  par  with  the  "  love 
me,  love  my  dog  "  theory,  and  incidentally  in  this  con- 
nection it  is  worthy  of  remark  that  Shakespeare  always 
derides  dogs  :  for  him  they  seem  always  to  be  synony- 
mous with  some  vice ;  he  is,  if  there  ever  was  one,  a  dog- 
hater,  which  is  all  the  more  strange  when  we  think  of 
his  love  for  the  open  air  and  the  country,  and  his  know- 
ledge of  hounds.  No  man  ever  described  the  chase  from 
the  point  of  view  of  the  hare  so  well  as  Shakespeare ; 
no  man  ever  described  a  hound  so  well — and  yet  he 
hated  dogs  !     It  is  a  strange  anomaly. 

That  he  was  generous  and  liberal-minded  is  clear  to 
anyone  who  has  read  The  Merchant  of  Venice ;  every- 
one in  the  play  (except  Shy  lock)  seems  to  look  on  money 
as  dirt,  and  miserliness  is,  to  Shakespeare's  mind, 
certainly  only  a  lesser  crime  than  ingratitude.  I  have 
touched  on  his  snobbishness  before ;  it  is,  of  course,  a 
national  trait,  but  Shakespeare  seems  to  have  suffered 
from  the  malady  badly  ;  it  is  strange  indeed  to  think 
that  so  great  a  man  should  have  worried  to  appeal  to 
the  Heralds'  Court  to  be  assigned  a  coat  of  arms  as 
befitted  a  gentleman ;  that  he  was  a  gentleman  and 
an  aristocrat  is  obvious,  but  none  the  less,  he  seems 
delighted  always  to  portray  himself  as  a  duke  or  prince 
whenever  possible. 

With  regard  to  his  politics  we  may  be  sure  that  he 
sided  with  law,  order  and  the  Constitution.  It  is  not 
always  remembered  that  he  wrote  in  Tudor  times — it 
would  have  been  strange  indeed  had  he  done  otherwise, 
constituted  as  he  was — he  was  certainly  not  the  man  to 
understand  Jack  Cade ;  Piers  Plowman  would  have  left 
him  cold.  It  has  been  pointed  out  frequently  that  in  The 
Tempest  he  damned  the  Socialistic  point  of  view  for  ever, 
but  it  may  well  be  doubted  whether,  had  he  been  living 
now,  he  would  have  taken  even  the  trouble  to  do  that. 


26  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

"  Shakespeare  has  nowhere  drawn  the  religious  type 
of  man  in  his  plays  "  :  so  runs  the  famous  indictment 
of  the  great  critic,  and  for  many  years  the  general 
reader  has  agreed  complacently  without  taking  the 
trouble  to  forage  for  himself  and  prove  the  truth  or 
falsity  of  this  sweeping  generalisation. 

It  all  depends  upon  what  you  mean  by  the  word 
religious  :  in  an  age  which  no  one  in  his  senses  could 
call  tolerant,  Shakespeare  stands  out  without  a  trace 
of  bigotry.  It  was  scarcely  likely  that  he  would  extol 
the  Roman  Catholics  :  on  the  other  hand,  he  has  no- 
where left  a  living  picture  of  the  fanatic  Puritan,  ready 
to  burn  for  his  principles  if  need  be,  obsessed  by  the 
zeal  of  his  faith  which  could  remove  mountains  :  it 
would  have  been  so  easy  for  a  genius  who  had  only 
(apparently)  to  observe  a  man  to  become  him  to  have 
drawn  an  imperishable  portrait  of  the  finest  type  of 
Puritan :  but  no ;  the  truth  must  be  confessed : 
Shakespeare,  like  Homer,  had  his  blind  side  :  to  put  it 
shortly,  the  type  did  not  interest  him  ;  the  middle-class 
shopkeeper,  together  with  the  zealot,  failed  to  attract 
him.  Shakespeare  was  for  ever  depicting  the  highest 
and  the  lowest ;  he  seemed  not  to  see  the  vast  millions 
who  lay  in  between  :  that  was  part  and  parcel  of  his 
aristocratic  temperament. 

That  he  was  contemptuous,  in  a  quite  minor  degree, 
both  of  ordinary  citizens  and  of  the  Puritans,  was 
natural  when  we  think  how  both  these  types  combined  to 
oppose  the  acting  of  plays,  and  even  petitioned  Elizabeth 
to  banish  theatres  to  the  suburbs,  but  it  is  absurd  to  take 
Sir  Andrew  Aguecheek's  opinion  as  Shakespeare's  : — 

Maria.   Marry,  sir,  sometimes  he  is  a  kind  of  Puritan. 
Sir  Andrew.  O,  if  I  thought  that,  I'd  beat  him  like  a  dog. 
Sir    Toby.     What,    for    being    a    Puritan  ?     Thy    exquisite 
reason,  dear  knight  ? 


SHAKESPEARE  27 

Sir  Andrew.  I  have  no  exquisite  reason  for't,  but  I  have 
reason  good  enough. 

Incidentally  it  is  to  be  noticed  a  propos  of  Malvolio, 
that  Maria  replies  to  this  :  "  The  devil  a  Puritan  that 
he  is,  or  anything  constantly  but  a  time-pleaser." 

It  was  certainly  not  for  his  Puritanic  leanings  that 
Shakespeare  thought  fit  to  make  Malvolio  "  a  most 
notorious  geek  and  gull." 

The  above  dialogue  reflects  altogether  on  the  utter 
foolishness  of  Sir  Andrew,  and  not  at  all  on  the  Puritans 
as  a  body.  It  might  with  more  justice  be  urged  that 
Shakespeare  is  here  paying  the  Puritans  a  very  high 
compliment. 

No  :  the  truth  is  that  we  may  search  Shakespeare 
through  and  through  in  vain  to  discover  any  sectarian 
point  of  view  held  up  to  admiration  or  ridicule.  But 
religion,  to  all  except  the  few,  is  not  sectarian.  The 
point  at  issue  rather  is,  does  or  does  not  Shakespeare 
propound  a  theory  to  explain  the  riddle  of  life  ?  Does 
he  praise  virtue  and  condemn  vice  ?  Is  he,  in  the 
broadest  and  only  true  sense,  religious  ?  I  answer, 
without  the  shadow  of  a  doubt,  yes  ! 

It  must,  however,  first  of  all  be  remembered  that  the 
dramatist's  first  duty  is,  like  the  novelist's,  to  attract 
and  amuse  his  audience.  He  must  not  obtrude  his 
own  personality  or  moralise  upon  his  dramatis  per s once. 
His  business  is  to  show  you  the  unfolding  of  character, 
not  to  tell  you  what  to  think  of  the  character  as  if  he 
were  the  editor  of  a  school  edition  of  his  own  plays. 
He  is  also  bound  to  depict  life  as  he  sees  it,  not  as  it 
ought  or  ought  not  to  be. 

Hence  to  the  dullard  it  is  quite  possible  that  Shake- 
speare seems  to  have  no  ulterior  moral  purpose.  We 
have  tragedy  after  tragedy  in  which  the  stage  is  literally 
heaped  with  the  corpses  of  righteous  and  vicious  alike, 


28  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

in  that  indiscriminating  way  which,  as  the  Psalmist 
saw,  is  so  true  to  life.  The  righteous  man  may  beg  his 
bread,  and  appear  to  all  intents  and  purposes  forsaken, 
while  the  wicked  man  obviously  flourishes  like  a  green 
bay-tree.  But  that  is  not  all :  we  are  most  distinctly 
left  with  a  sense  (never  mentioned  in  so  many  words, 
but  plainly  hinted  at  again  and  again)  that  this  world 
is  not  all,  and  that  even  in  this  world  the  purpose  of  its 
progress  is  towards  virtue,  for  it  is  evil  that  violently 
disturbs  our  ordered  path ;  hence  it  follows  that 
nature  is  not  indifferent  between  evil  and  good,  but  is 
quite  definitely  on  the  side  of  the  angels.  The  whole 
theory  of  Shakespearean  tragedy  is  a  proof  of  Shake- 
speare's sane,  broad-minded,  religious  point  of  view. 

What  could  be  more  definite,  more  succinct,  more 
noble,  than  the  whole  attitude  of  Edgar  towards  life, 
summed  up  in  this  one  immortal  phrase  : — 

men  must  endure 
Their  going  hence,  even  as  their  coming  hither : 
Ripeness  is  all. 

Or,  again,  his  dictum  that 

The  gods  are  just,  and  of  our  pleasant  vices 
Make  instruments  to  scourge  us. 

Or, 

Think  that  the  clearest  gods,  who  make  them  honours 
Of  men's  impossibilities,  have  preserved  thee. 

It  would  be  easy  to  multiply  instances  from  his  lips 
to  prove  that  Edgar,  for  one,  was  deeply  religious.  To 
come  to  a  far  more  famous  instance,  who  would  deny 
that  Hamlet  was  instinct  with  a  very  real  sense  of 
religion  ? 

Xot  a  whit,  we  defy  augury  ;  there  is  a  special  providence 
in  the  fall  of  the  sparrow.      If  it  be  now,  'tis  not  to  come  ; 


SHAKESPEARE  29 

if  it  be  not  to  come,  it  will  be  now  :  if  it  be  not  now,  yet  it 
will  come :  the  readiness  is  all.  Since  no  man  has  aught 
of  what  he  leaves,  what  is't  to  leave  betimes  ?     Let  be. 

It  is  no  argument  to  the  contrary  to  quote  that,  on 
the  other  hand,  Macbeth  talks  about  "  the  way  to  dusty 
death,"  life  itself  being  "  but  a  tale,  told  by  an  idiot, 
full  of  sound  and  fury  signifying  nothing."  To  those 
whose  obsessions  have  perverted  their  true  nobility, 
and  degraded  them  below  the  level  of  normal  man, 
it  is  but  natural  that  they  should  turn  fatalist  at  the 
end.  Shakespeare,  in  all  his  tragedies,  but  emphasises 
the  truth  of  the  wise  Greek  saying  that  "  Character  is 
destiny,"  and  in  no  case  is  this  so  clearly  shown  as  in 
the  character  of  Banquo  in  the  same  play.  Banquo 
was  a  man  with  a  devout  sense  of  religion  if  there  ever 
was  one,  and  should  alone  convince  any  fair  critic  of 
the  untruth  of  my  opening  quotation  : — 

In  the  great  hand  of  God  I  stand,  and  thence 
Against  the  undivulged  pretence  I  fight 
Of  treasonous  malice. 

He  is  one  who,  determined  to  play  the  part  of  a  brave 
and  honest  man,  when  his  turn  comes,  fails  to  do  any- 
thing of  the  kind,  and  is  made  to  suffer  in  a  manner 
which  seems  quite  out  of  proportion  to  his  offence. 
What  Shakespeare  appears  to  have  on  his  mind  here 
is  the  incalculability  of  evil ;  once  start  a  train  of  evil 
factors  loose,  and  you  can  never  guess  at  the  damage 
which  such  a  procedure  entails.  All  you  can  be  sure 
about  is  the  impossibility  of  your  escape  from  the 
consequences. 

Banquo,   be  it  remembered,  prays  to   be  delivered 

from  temptation  : — 

merciful  powers, 
Restrain  in  me  the  cursed  thoughts  that  nature 
Gives  way  to  in  repose  ! 


30  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

like  the  God-fearing  man  he  was,  but  it  is  all  of  no  avail. 
He  succumbs,  and  swift  retribution  follows. 

Shakespeare  lovers  will  scarcely  need  to  be  reminded 
of  the  innate  sense  of  religion  which  is  so  outstanding  a 
characteristic  of  Horatio  as  well  as  Hamlet : — 

Hamlet.  There's  a  divinity  that  shapes  our  ends 
Rough-hew  them  how  we  will. 

Horatio.  That  is  most  certain. 

But  what  is  more  important  than  these  isolated  cases 
is  the  general  sense  and  unanalysable  impression  from 
all  Shakespearean  tragedy.  As  Bradley  very  truly 
says : — 

Sometimes  from  the  very  furnace  of  affliction  a  conviction 
seems  borne  to  us  that  somehow,  if  we  could  see  it,  this 
agony  counts  as  nothing  against  the  heroism  and  love  which 
appear  in  it  and  thrill  our  hearts.  Sometimes  we  are  driven 
to  cry  out  that  these  mighty  or  heavenly  spirits  who  perish 
are  too  great  for  the  little  space  in  which  they  move,  and 
that  they  vanish  not  into  nothingness  but  into  freedom. 
Sometimes  from  these  sources  and  from  others  comes  a 
presentiment,  formless  but  haunting  and  even  profound, 
that  all  the  fury  of  conflict,  with  its  waste  and  woe,  is  less 
than  half  the  truth,  even  an  illusion,  "  such  stuff  as  dreams 
are  made  on." 

And  just  because  Shakespeare  felt  so  deeply  and 
sympathised  so  keenly  with  suffering  humanity,  his 
religion  could  not  bear  to  be  confined  within  the  narrow 
limits  of  one  strait  sect,  least  of  all  of  that  sort  of  sect 
which,  in  a  few  years,  was  to  banish  the  maypole  and 
all  gaiety,  and  substitute  a  horrible  repression  of  all 
natural  outlets  for  the  emotions  of  the  people. 

His  was  the  religion  of  week-days  as  well  as  of 
Sundays  : — 

"  Dost  thou  think  because  thou  art  virtuous  that  there  shall 

be  no  more  cakes  and  ale  ?  " 
"  Yea   and    by  St  Anne,  ginger   shall   be  hot  i'  the  mouth 

too." 


SHAKESPEARE  31 

No  man  without  a  very  real  religion  would  ever  have 
possessed  in  such  an  accentuated  degree  that  almost 
divine  gift  of  forgiveness.  In  all  the  later  plays  we 
find  that  Shakespeare  pockets  all  his  grievances  and, 
God-like,  pardons  his  enemies  :  — 

The  rarer  action  is 
In  virtue  than  in  vengeance  :  they  being  penitent, 
The  sole  drift  of  my  purpose  doth  extend 
Not  a  frown  further. 

Posthumus  with  all  the  reason  in  the  world  to  give 
over  Iachimo  to  the  death  exclaims  : — 

The  power  that  I  have  on  you,  is  to  spare  you : 
The  malice  towards  you,  to  forgive  you  :  Live, 
And  deal  with  others  better. 

No  one  will  convince  me  that  the  man  who  coined  those 
two  phrases  was  devoid  of  the  religious  temperament. 

Shakespeare  did  not  shrink  from  heaping  scorn  on 
to  the  heads  of  ecclesiastical  hypocrites,  when  it  was 
necessary,  any  more  than  he  ever  refrained  from  show- 
ing up  abuses  in  any  branch  of  the  State,  even  to  the 
delineation  of  such  a  man  as  Angelo,  but  he  is  likewise 
not  ashamed  to  put  simple,  sincere  prayers  into  the 
mouths  of  his  soldier-kings,  Henry  V.  and  others,  which 
come  straight  from  the  heart  of  the  dramatist  himself. 
And,  finally,  to  any  one  who  yet  doubts,  I  would  recom- 
mend a  close  perusal  of  all  that  is  to  be  found  about 
Brutus  in  Julius  Ccesar. 

Shakespeare  always  leaves  us  on  a  note  of  hopefulness. 
We  are  never  depressed  by  any  of  his  tragedies  as  we  are 
by  the  work  of  so  many  of  the  moderns.  As  Meredith 
so  wonderfully  puts  it : 

How  smiles  he  at  a  generation  ranked 

In  gloomy  noddings  over  life  !     They  pass. 

Not  he  to  feed  upon  a  breast  unthanked, 
Or  eye  a  beauteous  face  in  a  cracked  glass. 


32  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

But  he  can  spy  that  little  twist  of  brain 

Which  moved  some  weighty  leader  of  the  blind, 
Unwitting  'twas  the  goad  of  personal  pain, 

To  view  in  curst  eclipse  our  Mother's  mind, 
And  show  us  of  some  rigid  harridan 

The  wretched  bondmen  till  the  end  of  time. 
O  lived  the  Master  now  to  paint  us  Man, 

That  little  twist  of  brain  would  ring  a  chime 
Of  whence  it  came  and  what  it  caused,  to  start 
Thunders  of  laughter,  clearing  air  and  heart. 

Tragedy  is  to  Shakespeare  a  consequence  of  some 
obsession  :  in  Hamlet  the  consequence  of  irresolution 
following  upon  too  much  thinking  ;  in  Lear  the  conse- 
quence of  a  foolish  inability  to  understand  human 
nature ;  in  Coriolanus  the  consequence  of  too  over- 
weening a  pride ;  in  Othello  the  consequence  of  a  too 
credulous  mind  ;  in  Antony  the  consequence  of  an  un- 
bridled passion.  In  every  case  man  suffers  in  a  way 
totally  disproportionate  to  the  wrong  done  ;  the  point 
to  notice  is  that  in  each  case  the  calamities  do  not 
simply  happen,  nor  are  they  sent :  they  proceed  mainly 
from  actions  :  the  protagonist  sets  the  wheels  of  Fate 
in  motion  and  nothing  can  prevent  their  revolving  to 
the  inexorable  end,  the  death,  after  intolerable  suffer- 
ing, of  the  hero.  The  tragedy  lies  in  the  fact  that,  once 
having  started  the  course  of  events,  man  is  no  longer 
able  to  calculate  the  results  nor  to  control  them  ;  the 
interest  lies  entirely  in  the  inward  struggle  ;  but  Ave  are 
never  depressed,  simply  because  we  never  get  the  feeling 
that  man  is  but  a  poor,  weak  creature.  On  the  con- 
trary, in  most  cases  he  r>uts  up  a  magnificent  fight  and 
has  so  much  greatness  that  we  are  led  to  dwell  rather 
upon  the  grand  possibilities  of  human  nature  than  upon 
its  downfall  in  this  particular  case,  and,  most  important 
of  all,  we  notice  that  the  main  source  of  the  suffering  in 
tragedy  is  evil.     If,  therefore,  it  is  evil  that  violently 


SHAKESPEARE  38 

disturbs  the  order  of  this  world,  this  order  cannot  be 
friendly  to  evil  or  indifferent  between  evil  and  good. 

This  leads  us  to  a  consideration  of  Shakespeare's 
villains,  among  whom,  of  course,  Iago  takes  precedence, 
much  as  Falstaff  does  among  his  men  of  humour.  Ever 
since  the  day  when  Coleridge  coined  his  magic  phrase  of 
kt  motiveless  malignity,-'  opinion  with  regard  to  Iago's 
temperament  has  differed  almost  as  much  as  it  has 
about  Hamlet.  There  is  no  quarrel  about  Iago's 
intellectual  gifts  :  he  had  not  a  stupendous  intellect, 
but,  within  limits,  he  most  certainly  had  a  finely  work- 
ing brain  ;  it  is  almost  as  if  Shakespeare  had  embodied 
his  own  intelligence  in  him.  He  is  critical,  but,  strangely 
enough,  not  maliciously  so.  Think  for  a  moment  of  his 
picture  of  the  women.  "  You're  pictures  out  of  doors, 
bells  in  your  parlours,  wild  cats  in  your  kitchens,"  and 
so  on.  What  could  be  wittier  or  fairer  ?  But  Shake- 
speare almost  immediately  impales  himself  upon  the 
horns  of  a  dilemma  from  which  there  is  no  escape. 
Having  endowed  his  puppet  with  brains,  he  then  strives 
to  make  him  concrete,  which  is  a  contradiction  in  terms, 
for  intellect  is  never  entirely  maleficent ;  perfect  pitiless 
malignity  is  as  impossible  for  man  as  perfect  innate 
goodness.  Again  and  again  the  reader  asks  himself 
why  Iago  is  so  venomous  ;  again  and  again  Iago  strives 
valiantly  (in  soliloquy)  to  provide  us  with  a  reason  ; 
he  adduces  many  :  not  one  of  them  will  hold  water  for 
an  instant. 

In  the  end  Othello  himself  asks  piteously  : 

W "ill  you,  I  pray,  demand  that  demi-devil 
Why  he  hath  thus  ensnared  ray  soul  and  body? 

Iago  refuses  to  answer ;  in  any  case,  whether  he  would 
or  would  not,  he  could  not,  for  the  simple  reason  that 
he  literally  did  not   know.     Iachimo  is  but  the  pale 


34,  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

shadow  of  Iago,  and  even  less  of  a  real  person.  Edmund 
alone  of  the  villains  has  gaiety,  and  is  more  or  less  to  be 
understood.  He  is  Shakespeare's  only  portrait  of  the 
adventurer  pure  and  simple,  though  by  no  means 
destitute  of  feeling.  He  certainly  lives  for  us,  being 
neither  all  black  nor  all  white,  as  so  many  of  the 
dramatist's  characters  are. 

There  is  one  other  point  in  connexion  with  Shake- 
spearean tragedy  which  is  not  the  least  important  part  of 
its  hold  upon  our  imagination.  I  mean  the  continual 
use  which  Shakespeare  makes  of  irony,  particularly  in 
Macbeth,  irony  on  the  part  of  the  author  himself, 
ironical  juxtapositions  of  persons  and  events,  and 
especially  that  species  which  we  call  "  Sophoclean," 
whereby  a  speaker  is  made  to  use  words  bearing  to  the 
audience,  in  addition  to  his  own  meaning,  a  further  and 
ominous  sense,  hidden  from  himself  and,  usually,  from 
the  other  persons  on  the  stage. 

Macbeth's  first  words  : — 

So  foul  and  fair  a  day  I  have  not  seen — 

are  a  famous  example  of  this,  echoing,  as  they  do, 
the  witches'  "  Fair  is  foul,  and  foul  is  fair."  "  Fail 
not  our  feast,"  says  Macbeth,  later,  to  Banquo, 
who  is  about  to  be  murdered.  "  My  lord,  I  will 
not,"  is  his  blood-curdling  reply — and  he  keeps  his 
promise. 

Instances  of  this  will  occur  at  once  to  all  readers  of 
the  tragedies  ;  this  device  is  extremely  useful  for  con- 
tributing to  excite  the  vague  fear  of  hidden  forces 
operating  on  minds  unconscious  of  their  influence ; 
added  to  this,  and  far  more  potent,  of  course,  is  the 
machinery  of  the  unseen  world  and  the  spirit  of  evil,  to 
the  Elizabethan  audiences  a  far  more  real  dread  than 
it  is  to  us. 


SHAKESPEARE  35 


IV 

Bothm  the  tragedies  and  comedies  it  is  essential  that 
we  take  into  account  the  audiences  for  whom  Shake- 
speare wrote  :  their  credulity  (if  we  can  call  it  so)  was 
extraordinary  ;  witchcraft  was  treated  with  respect,  as 
we  discover  in  Reginald  Scot's  Discoverie  of  Witchcraft 
(1584).  Fairy  lore  and  astrology  occupied  the  serious 
attention  of  vast  numbers  of  the  populace — but  far 
more  important  than  this,  from  our  point  of  view,  is  the 
insatiable  thirst  for  poetry,  which  was  almost  the  most 
pronounced  characteristic  of  these  rough,  bloodthirsty 
men  who  thronged,  afternoon  after  afternoon,  in  the 
theatres,  fresh  from  the  Spanish  Main  or  the  battle-fields 
in  Flanders.  Men  were  beginning  to  use  their  language 
and  extend  their  vocabulary ;  new  ideas  of  amazing 
import  were  penetrating  their  senses  daily.  They 
began  "to  go  crazy  "  over  poetry  ;  they  all  wrote  it, 
they  all  demanded  it  from  their  favourite  playwrights. 
Shakespeare,  as  usual,  gave  the  public  what  the  public 
wanted  ;  it  is  a  noteworthy  feature  of  his  genius  that 
he  seemed  to  pander  to  the  public  taste  by  giving  them 
all  their  old  favourite  machinery  while  changing  this 
machinery  in  the  crucible  of  his  mind  into  the  undying 
individual  men  and  women  we  now  know.  For  ex- 
ample, the  audience  demanded  a  fool  and  he  gave  them 
Feste  and  the  Fool  in  Lear.  They  demanded  a  Jew  who 
should  be  baited  and  he  gave  them  Shylock.  They 
demanded  witches  and  he  gave  them  Macbeth.  They 
demanded  blood  and  he  gave  them  Othello  and  Hamlet. 
Most  of  all  they  demanded  poetry,  and  he  gave  them 
thirty- seven  plays  so  steeped  in  magic  that  he  caused  a 
Low  Dutch  dialect  to  become^  the  cliiefest  instrument 
of  civilisation,  the  world- speech  of  humanity  at  large. 


86  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

Shakespeare  found  the  blank-verse  form  a  powerful 
vehicle  of  dramatic  elocution  as  used  by  Marlowe  and 
perfected  it  until  in  his  years  of  maturity  almost  un- 
wittingly he  seemed  to  coin  a  new  heaven  and  a  new 
earth  of  language ;  here  as  elsewhere,  however,  it  is  as 
well  to  recognise  that  he  was  no  innovator  as  Words- 
worth was  ;  he  did  not  invent  the  blank- verse  form  any 
more  than  he  invented  the  plots  for  his  plays  :  he  took 
whatever  he  found  to  be  grist  for  his  mill,  as  all  geniuses 
do,  from  the  store-cupboard  of  all  the  writers  who  had 
lived  before  him — discarding  here,  adding  there,  with 
no  thought  but  of  benefiting  from  them  and  improving 
upon  their  mistakes.  He  must  have  been  an  omnivor- 
ous reader,  much  of  the  same  type  as  Doctor  Johnson, 
who  tore  the  hearts  out  of  books  ruthlessly  in  order  to 
extract  the  honey  out  of  them  expeditiously.  The  fact 
that  Shakespeare  was  an  actor  surely  helped  him 
enormously  ;  knowing  as  he  did  the  exigencies  of  the 
stage,  he  would  in  his  remodelling  of  old  plays  know 
exactly  how  to  adapt  them  to  meet  the  popular  demands, 
and  we  shall  do  well  to  bear  in  mind  the  eight  features 
that  Coleridge  noted  when  he  tried  to  particularise  on 
Shakespeare's  peculiarities. 

First  he  notices  that  Shakespeare  gains  his  effect 
always  by  expectation  in  preference  to  surprise  ;  this  is 
ever  the  way  of  genius  ;  his  business  lies  in  the  un- 
ravelling of  character.  Your  interest  as  reader  or  play- 
goer is  in  the  development  of  character,  not  in  sudden 
surprises.  In  Macbeth,  for  instance,  we  are  led  gradually 
to  expect  the  murder  of  Duncan  ;  that  is  not  the  climax 
of  the  play  ;  it  is  the  result  of  the  murder  upon  Mac- 
beth's  inner  consciousness  that  so  holds  our  attention 
that  wc  scarcely  dare  to  draw  a  breath  until  the  last 
scene;  so  it  is  with  Hamlet.  It  is  the  strange,  un- 
accountable reluctance  in  the  hero  to  take  the  obvious 


SHAKESPEARE  87 

way  that  so  enthralls  us ;  we  feel  how  extraordinarily 
natural  it  all  is  and  yet  how  desperately  tragic ;  the 
excitement  is  all  the  more  tense  because  we  are  led 
to  expect  various  things;  we  don't  want  the  cheap 
substitution  of  surprise  for  expectation. 

Secondly,  Coleridge  notices  how  Shakespeare  adheres 
to  the  law  that  opposites  attract,  a  point  not  even  now 
sufficiently  recognised  by  those  who  study  the  psy- 
chology of  the  human  race.  What  was  it  that  attracted 
the  energetic,  highly  intellectual  Hamlet  in  the  anaemic, 
spiritless  doll,  Ophelia  ?  What  was  it  that  so  endeared 
the  gentle  Desdemona  to  the  warrior  Othello  ?  Why 
ever  did  Emilia  marry  Iago  or  Imogen  Posthumus  ? 
What  had  Henry  the  Fifth  in  common  with  Falstaff  or 
Falstaff  with  him  ?  Again  and  again  we  see  this  trait 
in  Shakespeare,  only  explicable  at  all  if  we  remember 
how  extraordinarily  true  it  is  in  real  life  that  opposites 
have  a  strange  attraction  for  each  other. 

The  third  point  is  that  Shakespeare  always  keeps  on 
the  high  road  ;  he  has  no  innocent  adulteries,  no  senti- 
mental rat-catchers,  no  aesthetic  butchers  ;  he  does  not 
penetrate  the  obscure  corners  of  life.  This  is  the  same 
feature  which  Meredith  recognised  when  he  said  : 

He  probed  from  hell  to  hell 

Of  human  passions,  but  of  love  deflowered 
His  wisdom  was  not  for  he  knew  thee  [Mother  Earth]  well. 

There  is  no  "  sick  philosophy  "  in  Shakespeare  as  there 
has  been  in  so  much  of  our  modern  writing  ;  he  had  no 
leanings  towards  an  inverted  morality  which  would 
prove  immorality  moral  and  all  morality  immoral.  It 
is  with  a  sense  of  getting  back  to  clean,  fresh  air,  after 
having  been  immured  in  a  cesspool,  that  we  read 
Shakespeare  after  some  of  our  latter-day  prophets. 
Shakespeare's    fourth    peculiarity    is    his    absolute 


88  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

independence  between  the  dramatic  interest  and  the 
plot :  the  plot  is  simply  the  canvas,  nothing  more  :  it  is 
quite  secondary  to  and  independent  of  the  main  pur- 
pose— the  unfolding  of  character.  This  explains  once 
again  why  Shakespeare  never  troubled  to  invent  a  plot ; 
the  fifth  peculiarity  follows  from  the  fourth;  and  is  the 
indejoendence  of  the  interest  on  the  story  as  the  ground- 
work of  the  plot. 

The  sixth  feature  is  the  interfusion  of  the  lyrical  with, 
in  and  through  the  dramatic.  Songs,  Coleridge  noticed, 
in  Shakespeare  are  introduced  as  songs  only  ;  and  yet 
how  he  heightens  the  humour,  tightens  the  intensity 
and  more  forcibly  brings  home  to  us  the  point  of  view 
he  would  have  us  carry  away.  His  personal  love  of 
music  to  a  great  extent,  of  course,  accounts  for  this,  but 
it  is  as  well  to  remember  how  here  again  he  takes  the  old 
machinery  and  turns  it  to  his  own  good  purpose. 

The  seventh  point  is  perhaps  the  most  important  of 
all  :  it  is  that  the  characters  of  the  dramatis  persona?, 
like  those  in  real  life,  are  to  be  inferred  by  the  reader  ; 
they  are  not  told  to  him.  This  is  the  reason  why  we 
come  to  so  many  different  conclusions  in  our  readings 
of  the  different  characters  ;  for  years  we  are  content  to 
take  other  men's  opinions,  and  then,  suddenly  waking  up 
from  our  lethargic  acquiescence  in  their  views,  we  reread 
the  play  again  for  ourselves  and  find,  perhaps,  that  Henry 
the  Fifth  was  not  the  model  man  of  valour  we  had  been 
led  to  think  him,  nor  Falstaff  so  much  of  a  coward  as 
we  had  been  led  to  believe.  We  find  that  many  of  his 
later  heroines  are  scarcely  more  than  milk  and  watery 
abstractions,  where  we  had  before  thought  them  glorious 
specimens  of  perfect  English  girlhood  at  its  best. 

Lastly,  Coleridge  would  have  us  notice  how  every- 
thing, however  heterogeneous  in  Shakespeare,  is  united, 
as  it  is  in  Nature ;    in  other  words,  passion  is  that  by 


SHAKESPEARE  30 

which  the  individual  is  distinguished  from  others,  not 
that  which  makes  a  different  kind  of  him.  These  eight 
peculiarities  are  specially  important  for  us  to  notice  as 
we  pass  along,  trying  to  build  up  for  ourselves  the  com- 
plete picture  of  our  Shakespeare.  So  far  as  he  goes 
Coleridge  is  seldom  in  the  wrong,  but  there  are  several 
points  still  to  be  touched  on  before  we  can  hope  to  have 
gained  an  all-round  view. 


For  instance,  Coleridge  never  mentioned  the  astonish- 
ingly brilliant  way  in  which  Shakespeare  introduced  his 
very  necessary  stage  directions  into  the  text.  When  we 
take  into  account  the  absence  of  all  scenery  and  the  fact 
that  these  plays  were  acted  in  broad  daylight,  in 
theatres  open  alike  to  sun  and  rain,  we  begin  to  realise 
with  what  almost  insurmountable  difficulties  the  play- 
wright had  to  cope,  we  are  lost  in  admiration  at  the 
natural  way  in  which  the  poet  intersperses  his  hints 
about  the  time  of  day,  the  attitude  and  dress  of  the 
character,  almost  unnoticeably  in  the  text.  How  often, 
for  instance,  in  the  churchyard  scene  in  Romeo  and  Juliet, 
does  Shakespeare  lay  stress  upon  the  fact  that  it  is  pitch 
dark  ?  The  opening  words  attune  our  ears  to  the 
general  gloom  : 

Give  me  thy  torch,  boy  :  hence  and  stand  aloof, 
Yet  put  it  out,  for  I  would  not  be  seen, 

says  Paris.  Romeo,  after  he  has  killed  him,  pretends 
that  he  has  not  been  able  to  see  his  opponent's  face  : 
"  Let  me  peruse  this  face."  When  Friar  Laurence 
enters  he  begins  : 

What  torch  is  yond',  that  vainly  lends  his  light 
To  grubs  and  eyeless  skulls  ? 


40  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

Paris's  page  on  his  re-entry  with  the  watch 
says  : 

This  is  the  place  :  there,  where  the  torch  doth  burn. 

But  Shakespeare  not  only  introduces  these  very  neces- 
sary hints  into  the  poetry,  but  he  sometimes,  with 
magical  success,  makes  his  stage  direction  have  a  real 
bearing  on  the  plot.  The  most  famous  instance  of  this 
is,  of  course,  in  Othello  : 

Put  out  the  light,  and  then  put  out  the  light — 

when  Othello  comes  in  to  murder  Desdemona. 

In  Julius  Ccesar,  when  Brutus  and  Cassius  are  com- 
muning apart,  Shakespeare  seizes  the  opportunity  to 
emphasise  the  time  of  day  by  making  the  rest  of  the 
conspirators  argue  : 

Decius.   Here  lies  the  east :  doth  not  the  day  break  here  ? 

Casca.   No. 

China.  O,  pardon,  sir,  it  doth  :  and  yon  grey  lines, 
That  fret  the  clouds,  are  messengers  of  day. 

Casca.  You  shall  confess  that  you  are  both  deceived. 
Here,  as  I  point  my  sword,  the  sun  arises  : 
Which  is  a  great  way  growing  on  the  south, 
Weighing  the  youthful  season  of  the  year. 

How  extraordinarily  it  adds  to  the  poignancy  of 
Macduff's  suffering  to  hear  Malcolm's 

What !  man,  ne'er  pull  your  hat  upon  your  brows. 

It  visualises  the  scene  exactly ;  you  feel  that  you  are 
really  there,  a  spectator  of  the  sad  sight  of  the  strong 
man  bowed  with  grief,  unable  to  do  anything  to 
assuage  it, 

Shakespeare  more  than  any  other  man  in  the  world 
seems  always  to  have  the  exact  word  or  phrase  at  his 
command  with  which  to  captivate  our  attention.  How 
graphic    is    that    touch    of    tl  crying "    in    Prospero's 


SHAKESPEARE  41 

description  of  his  wandering  with  Miranda  in  an  open 
boat  in  her  infant  years  :  "  Me  and  thy  crying  self,"  or 
that  wonderful  use  of  the  word  "  inly  "  in  "  the  inly 
touch  of  love." 

Everyone  will  recall  the  "  hoary  leaves  of  the  willow  " 
which  were  showing  in  "  the  glassy  stream  "  where 
Ophelia  drowned  herself,  and  Cleopatra's 

He's  speaking  now, 
Or  murmuring  "  Where's  my  serpent  of  old  Nile  ? " 

His  language  seems  always  to  have  been,  as  Hazlitt 
said,  hieroglyphical ;  it  translates  thoughts  into  visible 
images,  so  that  you  not  only  see  and  understand  what 
he  describes  but  are  yourself  transported  there.  Think 
of  this  description  :  ' '  Light  thickens  and  the  crow 
makes  wing  to  the  rooky  wood."  No  other  words 
would  do,  nothing  else  call  up  quite  the  image  which  we 
visualise  when  we  read  this. 

Strangely  enough,  when  his  characters  are  acting 
under  the  stress  of  great  emotion,  they  have  a  wonder- 
ful habit  of  coining  words.  By  far  the  best  known 
instance  is  the 

No ;  this  my  hand  will  rather 
The  multitudinous  seas  incarnadine, 
Making  the  green  one  red 

of  Macbeth. 

It  is  here  particularly  that  we  congratulate  ourselves 
on  the  fact  that  Shakespeare  was  unacademic  and  had 
no  conventional  prejudices  to  outgrow  ;  he  would  have 
no  natural  re23Ugnance  against  coining  a  fresh  word  if 
his  vocabulary  failed  him  at  a  particular  point.  What 
he  did  possess  was  an  unerring  ear  for  music,  so 
finely  developed  that  words  seem  to  come  at  his 
beck  and  call  straight  from  heaven.     It  is  this  that 


42  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

makes  us  gasp  at  the  pure  magic  of  such  a  lyrical 
outburst  as  : 

O  !  my  love  !  my  wife  ! 
Death,  that  hath  sucked  the  honey  of  thy  breath, 
Hath  had  no  power  yet  against  thy  beauty  : 
Thou  art  not  conquer'd  ;  beauty's  ensign  yet 
Is  crimson  in  thy  lips,  and  in  thy  cheeks, 
And  death's  pale  flag  is  not  advanced  there. 

He  had  this  gift  from  the  very  start.  Think  of  the 
stupendous  sonnet  which  begins  : 

Full  many  a  glorious  morning  have  I  seen 
Flatter  the  mountain  tops  with  sovran  eye, 
Kissing  with  golden  face  the  meadows  green, 
Gilding  pale  streams  with  heavenly  alchymy. 

Could  ever  passionate  love  find  more  exquisite 
expression  in  fewer  words  than  in  the 

O  thou  weed  that  are  so  lovely  fair 
That  the  sense  aches  at  thee 

of  Othello  ? 

Or  was  ever  a  picture  of  Nature's  beauties  drawn  that 
would  parallel  Perdita's 

Daffodils 
That  come  before  the  swallow  dares  and  take 
The  winds  of  March  with  beauty  :  violets  dim 
But  sweeter  than  the  lids  of  Juno's  eyes 
Or  Cytherea's  breath  .  .   .   ? 

Milton's  attempts,  fine  as  they  are,  induce  the  criti- 
cism which  Bagehot  invented.  "  Why,"  he  says,  at  the 
conclusion  of  a  long  description  of  natural  phenomena 
in  Paradise  Lost,  "  you  could  draw  a  map  of  it." 

This,  then,  is  the  secret  of  Shakespeare's  greatness  ; 
not  only  had  he,  owing  to  his  experiencing  nature,  his 
large  catholic  sympathies,  his  ever-roaming,  ever- 
interested  eye,  the  power  of  visualising  man's  char- 


SHAKESPEARE  43 

acteristics,  but  superimposed  upon  that  he  had  the 
faculty  for  clothing  his  myriad  thoughts  in  the  most 
perfectly  fitting  expressions  that  it  has  been  the  good 
fortune  of  any  genius  to  own. 

It  is  easy  to  sum  up  his  limitations,  for  they  are  almost 
trivial ;  he  does  not  seem  to  have  been  interested  in 
novelties  (he  never  mentions  potatoes  or  tobacco  ;  we 
get  a  better  insight  into  the  common  life  of  the  Eliza- 
bethans by  reading  the  contemporary  drama  of  Dekker, 
Jonson  and  the  rest  of  them).  He  had  a  supreme  con- 
tempt for  misers,  Puritans  and  the  middle  classes  ;  he 
may  have  been  a  bit  of  a  snob,  and  was  probably 
sensuous — his  faults  only  make  him  the  more  human, 
the  more  lovable.  What  we  do  know  about  him  is  that 
he  was  sunny,  gentle,  richly  endowed  with  a  sense  of 
humour  which,  in  all  probability,  saved  him  in  the  years 
when  he  probed  from  hell  to  hell  the  human  passions, 
but  we  know  that  he  emerged  serene  in  the  latest  years, 
having  discovered  that 

The  rarer  action  is 
In  virtue  than  in  vengeance. 

The  power  of  being  able  to  forgive  your  adversary 
Shakespeare  ranks  as  almost  the  most  priceless  attribute 
of  man.  He  can  even  find  it  in  him  to  forgive  Iachimo. 
"  What  an  inhuman  world,"  some  modern  philosopher 
once  said,  "  it  would  be  without  the  old."  Youth  is 
apt  to  be  astonishingly  cruel  from  the  days  when  in 
earliest  infancy  it  deprives  the  fly  upon  the  window- 
pane  of  its  wings,  "  just  for  fun."  Shakespeare  seems 
to  have  been  the  great  exception  to  this  ;  he  had  a  very 
real  horror  of  all  kinds  of  cruelty.  He  was  almost 
womanish  in  his  dislike  of  harsh  words  or  blows  ;  we 
feel  that  he  could  never  have  been  a  soldier  ;  he  shrank 
instinctively  from  bloodshed  as  he  shrank  from  crowds 


44  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

whom  he  did  not  understand  but  only  loathed,  as 
sensitive  people  so  often  do.  He  was  never  so  happy 
as  when  he  was  in  solitude  or  in  the  country,  where  he 
could  people  the  air  with  his  fancies,  yet  he  took  a 
delight  in  the  material  world  or  he  would  never  have 
been  able  to  float  those  bubbles  in  the  air  or  to  lift  the 
land  into  mountain  slopes  so  naturally,  so  entirely 
without  effort,  as  Emerson  says  : 

He  had  the  faculty  of  being  able  to  change  places  at  will 
with  all  humanity,  turning  the  globe  round  for  his  amusement : 
it  is  not  that  he  seeks  to  edify  us,  he  wishes  rather  to  amuse 
both  himself  and  us  .  .  .  the  dreams  of  childhood,  the 
ravings  of  despair  were  alike  the  toys  of  his  fancy. 

His  was  not  that  cloistered  virtue  which  Milton  held 
so  much  in  contempt,  which  refused  to  sally  forth  and 
seek  its  adversary  ;  rather  at  times  did  gentle  Shake- 
speare suffer  horrible  tortures  amid  the  dust  and  heat — 
"  sed  non  sine  pulvere  palma."  Through  tribulation 
he  came  to  know  men  better,  and  out  of  the  fire  he  came 
purified  seven  times,  so  that  he  left  behind,  as  his 
testament  to  mankind,  poetry  so  rich  and  full  of  multi- 
tudinous beauties  that  the  language  in  which  it  was 
written  has  become  the  noblest  in  the  world,  a  gallery 
of  portraits  of  men  and  women  whom  we  know  more 
intimately  than  our  nearest  and  dearest,  and  thoughts 
couched  in  the  most  inspiring,  unforgettable  phrase- 
ology that  ever  man  could  desire  to  solace  and  refresh 
him  in  the  arid  deserts  of  life. 

When  we  want  to  laugh,  to  cry,  to  be  quiet,  to  be 
boisterous,  to  find  a  friend,  or  be  alone,  whatever  our 
mood,  Shakespeare  can  enter  into  it  and-provide  us  with 
exactly  the  companion  we  most  need.  Of  all  men  who 
have  really  lived  he  is  the  first  to  whom  we  turn  when 
in  trouble  or  joy  ;  he  halves  our  sorrows  and  doubles 
our  delights,  for  he  is  the  most  human,  the  readiest  to 


SHAKESPEARE  45 

understand,  the  quickest  to  soothe  our  troubled  senses. 
It  is  the  greatest  privilege  that  we  enjoy  as  Englishmen 
that  this  man  was  of  our  blood,  an  Englishman  for  the 
English.  It  is  by  far  the  greatest  achievement  that 
we  as  a  nation  have  yet  wrought  that  we  have  produced 
Shakespeare. 

A  rarer  spirit  never 
Did  steer  humanity. 


II 

THE  EIGHTEENTH   CENTURY 

MR  SAINTSBURY,  in  his  latest  critical  work, 
very  cleverly  proves  how  necessary  it  is  for 
those  of  us  who  pine  and  peek  and  fret  amid 
the  turmoil  of  our  frenzied  life  to-day  to  go  back  to  the 
eighteenth  century  for  the  sake  of  our  peace  of  mind. 
We  are  only  too  apt  to  live  for  the  newspapers,  buying 
edition  after  edition  in  the  hope  of  finding  better  news 
from  all  the  various  scenes  of  action.  Our  conversation 
runs  in  the  everlasting  groove  of  war  and  all  its  side 
issues ;  when  work  is  over,  and  we  are  for  a  few  moments 
at  leisure,  we  either  go  out  to  a  theatre  or  else  plunge 
recklessly  into  a  modern  novel,  with  its  inevitable  lead- 
ing up  to  the  climax  of  August,  1914.  How  much  better 
it  would  be  if  we  could  only  uproot  ourselves  from  our 
present  age  of  agony  in  our  hours  of  recreation  and 
immerse  ourselves  in  the  placid  waters  of  the  Augustan 
lake. 

No  century  has  received  more  neglect  than  this  one ; 
no  century  ever  deserved  neglect  less.  From  1700  to 
1798  is  a  period  full  of  good  things,  all  specifics  for  our 
present-day  malady.  It  is  just  a  case  of  having  given 
the  dog  a  bad  name  and  the  name  has  most  unjustly 
stuck.  It  will  therefore  be,  perhaps,  a  good  thing  first 
of  all  to  clear  the  ground  and  state  exactly  what  the 
eighteenth  century  set  out  to  do  ;  how  far  it  attained 
its  aim ;  what  it  did  not  pretend  to  achieve,  and  wherein 
lies  the  difference  between  our  own  age  and  that  of  the 
earlier  Georges.  The  whole  century  was  given  over  to 
the  cult  of  common- sense ;    it  viewed   any  tendency 

4e 


THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY  47 

towards  such  a  thing  as  Enthusiasm  with  suspicion ; 
clarity  of  diction,  sparkling  wit,  sound  material-mind  ed- 
ness,  etc.,  the  avoidance  of  any  exaggerated  notions 
about  idealism  or  other  abstract  "  highfalutin  "  words, 
were  conspicuously  present  in  all  its  writers.  Nothing 
could  have  been  further  removed  from  Shakespeare 
and  Milton  on  the  one  side  or  the  Romantic  revivalists 
on  the  other.  The  field  it  set  before  itself  to  cover  was 
a  small  one.  The  point  to  remember  is  that  it  covered 
it  perfectly  ;  it  never  failed  to  achieve  its  purpose, 
whether  in  prose,  poetry,  satire,  the  writing  of  letters, 
or  the  more  gigantic  feat  of  composing  novels.  It  had 
no  concejDtion  of  "  the  desire  of  the  moth  for  the  star  " 
theory,  and  Keats  and  Shelley  were  right  outside  its 
ken.  It  had  no  dealings  with  the  sublime,  and  it 
descended  but  rarely  to  the  ridiculous.  There  was  a 
robust  sanity  about  it  which  compels  admiration  at  all 
times,  and  it  was  rarely  dull. 

Now  everyone  will  allow  that  the  tendency  to-day  is 
all  towards  introspection,  a  state  of  continual  hustle 
as  we  search  after  whatever  chimera  for  the  moment 
attracts  us.  Some  of  us  believe  (Mr  Saintsbury  is  not 
among  the  number  ;  he  seizes  every  opportunity  to  be 
rude  to  this  fledgling  century  of  ours)  that  the  last  few 
years  have  been  extraordinarily  productive  of  good 
poetry,  lasting  novels,  and  even  of  some  signs  of  a  sane 
dramatic  revival.  However  that  may  be,  the  point 
rather  lies  in  the  fact  that  we  have  much  to  learn  from 
an  age  when  enthusiasm  was  regarded  as  a  vice,  and  the 
end  of  knowledge,  the  habit  of  moderating  the  passions. 
It  is  a  truism  that  our  best  work  is  done  when  we  are 
"  calm,  cool  and  collected,"  as  the  nerve  doctors  say. 
Most  of  us  suffer  from  too  highly  strung  nerves,  and 
consequently  splash  our  canvas  with  all  manner  of 
colours,  careless  of  co-ordination,  of  shadows  and  lights, 


48  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

only  pleased  that  such  and  such  a  patch  looks  beautiful. 
There  is  to-day  a  very  noticeable  lack  of  method,  a  kind 
of  neurasthenic  irritability  in  the  work  of  even  the  best 
men,  which  indicates  the  need  for  a  long  rest  cure 
among  the  Augustans.  In  a  word,  our  enthusiasms, 
excellent  in  intention  as  they  are,  need  the  tempering 
that  can  only  be  gained  by  a  course  of  Swift,  Johnson, 
Addison,  Pope  and  the  rest  of  a  school  who  never 
suffered  their  passions  to  get  the  upper  hand. 

It  is  good  for  us  to  renew  our  acquaintance  with  Sir 
Roger  de  Coverley,  Will  Honeycomb  and  all  the  ador- 
able bevy  of  bepatched  beauties — Chloe,  Clarissa, 
Vanessa,  Flavia  and  so  on,  of  The  Taller  and  Spectator  ; 
to  turn  over  the  pages  of  Addison's  or  Steele's  Essays, 
and  to  watch  Sir  Roger  at  the  play,  in  church,  in  West- 
minster Abbey,  with  the  gipsies,  at  the  Quarter  Sessions 
— to  enter  again  into  that  life  where  ladies  are  laughed 
out  of  their  petty  foibles  and  vain  fancies,  to  read 
Addison's  Saturday  sermons  or  his  criticism  on  Paradise 
Lost,  interleaved  with  his  sly  reprimands  to  the  oglers 
and  street-criers,  the  antics  of  the  fan- wavers  and  the 
members  of  the  Trumpet  and  other  clubs.  It  is  all  very 
quiet,  always  witty,  never  heavy  or  dull,  and,  what  is 
most  important,  as  different  as  possible  from  our  life 
to-day.  And  after  Addison,  Swift.  Miserrimus  as 
he  was  in  his  own  life,  he  never  lifted  the  veil  too  far. 
It  was,  as  he  himself  said,  only  mankind  in  the  mass 
that  he  hated  ;  individual  members  of  society  he  loved, 
and,  for  all  the  carping  of  our  more  inane  critics, 
Gulliver's  Travels  does  stand  out  as  one  of  the  most 
humorous  books  ever  written.  Lacking,  indeed,  in  the 
comic  spirit  must  that  man  be  who  is  unable  to  be 
tickled  inwardly  at  the  innumerable  funny  things  in 
Lilliput  and  Brobdingnag,  or  intellectually  fed  with  the 
amazing  genius  that  went  to  the  making  of  A  Tale  of  a 


THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY  M) 

Tub.  It  is  all  part  and  parcel  of  the  scheme  of  the 
century  that  Swift  was  so  far  able  to  control  his  passions 
that  he  could  write  so  sweetly  (yes,  sweetly)  that  children 
are  kept  from  their  play  by  the  delights  of  Gulliver  and 
grown-up  men  and  women  can  find  refection  in  the  finest 
satire  that  has  ever  been  written.  But  it  is  to  The 
Journal  to  Stella  that  we  ought  most  surely  to  turn  if  we 
want  comfort  and  rest.  Here  we  have  a  slice  of  import- 
ant history,  a  sketch  of  manners  delightful  in  them- 
selves, a  gazette  in  miniature,  mingled  pathos,  humour 
and  love,  pride  and  jealousy,  all  written  not  in  ink,  but 
blood,  making  up  a  marvellous  and  absolutely  genuine 
autobiography.  It  is  doubtful  whether,  when  we 
require  pure  recreation,  there  is  any  author  so  capable 
of  gripping  our  attention  and  holding  us  as  the  man 
who  wrote  not  only  the  above,  but  Polite  Conversation, 
A  Modest  Proposal,  The  Drapier  Letters  and  The  Battle 
of  the  Books,  to  satisfy  our  aching  senses. 

Pope's  place  in  literature  has  long  been  decided,  but, 
because  it  has  been  granted  that  he  is  not  a  poet  of  the 
Wordsworthian  order,  it  has  somehow  followed  that  he 
has  been  little  read  of  late.  We  acknowledge  his  lack 
of  originality,  his  insincerity  and  shallowness  of  thought, 
but  his  positive  qualities  more  than  outweigh  these 
deficiencies.  He  is  always  witty,  always  polished  and 
urbane,  and  never  devoid  of  an  intellectual  quality  that 
is  not  to  be  analysed,  but  is  always  felt  and  appreciated 
by  all  but  the  most  meticulously  romantic  critics.  The 
man  or  woman  who  fails  to  derive  a  very  real  pleasure 
from  that  consummately  artistic  mock-heroic  epic,  The 
Rape  of  the  Lock,  is  sincerely  to  be  pitied,  while  the  Essay 
on  Criticism  and  the  Essay  on  Man  sum  up,  in  the  most 
compact  and  charming  style,  aphorisms  that  have 
become  the  commonplaces  of  our  everyday  speech. 
The  couplet  about  "  true  wit  "  is  not  the  less  valuable 


50  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

because  it  has  suffered  from  too  much  bandying  about. 
But  we  ought  to  reread  not  only  Pope,  but  the  sunny, 
honey-tongued  Prior,  Gay,  Akenside,  Churchill,  Thom- 
son and  Young,  all  of  whom  contributed  poetry  of  a 
kind  that  is  at  once  direct,  soothing,  witty  and  polished. 
For  far  too  long  have  these  poets  suffered  an  undeserved 
neglect  and  been  chastised  for  daring  to  be  limited  in 
scope  and  execution.  They  form  a  very  definite  link 
in  the  history  of  English  poetry.  If  they  did  nothing 
else  they  knocked  a  real  sense  of  regular  rhythm  into 
the  English  head,  and  for  this  alone  we  ought  to  be 
devoutly  thankful.  But  it  is  when  we  arrive  at  the 
birth  of  the  novel  proper  in  Richardson,  Fielding, 
Smollett  and  Sterne  that  we  stand  on  the  surest  ground. 
I  by  no  means  agree  with  Mr  Saintsbury's  estimate  of 
our  own  age  when  he  complains  of  the  poverty  of  our 
modern  novelists.  Rather  do  I  feel,  after  a  new  work 
of  Compton  Mackenzie,  Hugh  Walpole,  Joseph  Conrad, 
H.  G.  Wells,  Arnold  Bennett,  Gilbert  Cannan,  St  John 
Lucas  and  the  rest  of  our  younger  writers,  that  we  live 
in  the  golden  age  of  the  novel,  but  I  readily  acknow- 
ledge that,  for  pure  rest  and  refreshment,  I  prefer 
Fielding,  the  innovator  and  perfecter  of  the  direct 
narrative  type  of  fiction.  There  is  so  much  searching 
of  heart,  so  much  dwelling  on  sordid  details  in  the 
novelist  of  to-day,  that  we  become  troubled  and 
"  nervy "  ourselves  after  a  dose  of  their  work. 
Fielding,  on  the  other  hand,  simply  enchants  us.  We 
are  not  in  the  least  perturbed  by  the  many  accidents  by 
flood  and  field  that  befall  Tom  Jones  or  Joseph  Andrews ; 
we  watch  the  rapidly  moving  events  as  if  in  a  kinema. 
We  are  transported  to  an  age  in  which  we  most  decidedly 
would  not  choose  to  live,  but  which  is  still  picturesque, 
real,  robust  and  full  of  sound  common-sense  and  good 
humour.     Partridge  and  Parson  Adams  are  an  ever- 


THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY  51 

lasting  joy,  and  give  us  as  much  real  rest  and  happiness 
as  any  of  Shakespeare's  characters.  I  am  convinced 
that  no  better  prescription  could  be  devised  for  those 
who  would  forget  for  a  few  hours  the  woes  of  to-day 
than  a  course  of  eighteenth-century  novel-reading — not 
only  all  Fielding,  Pamela,  Humphrey  Clinker  and 
Tristram  Shandy,  but  John  Buncle,  The  Spiritual 
Quixote,  The  Case  of  Otranto,  Vathek,  Peter  Wilkins 
and  Moll  Flanders.  All  these  novels  are  written  with 
the  one  idea  of  amusing  their  readers  and  interesting 
them  by  excitement,  suspense,  pathos,  sarcasm — by 
whatever  means  their  authors  could  devise.  That  they 
succeeded  for  their  own  immediate  readers  is  well 
known  ;  that  they  are  less  read  to-day  casts  an  un- 
worthy aspersion  on  our  critical  faculties.  For  the  by 
no  means  to  be  despised  gift  of  story-telling,  this  age 
has  never  been  approached,  and  it  is  this  lost  art  that 
we  now  so  much  deplore  and  so  much  need  to  comfort 
and  console  us  in  our  leisure  hours. 

Lord  Rosebery  only  echoed  an  opinion  held  by  very 
many  cultivated  men  of  taste  when  he  declared  that 
there  was  no  bed  book  in  the  world  to  compare  with 
BoswelPs  Life  of  John-son,  no  other  book  which  could 
compete  with  it  as  a  solace  for  the  convalescent.  I 
myself  can  put  on  record  that,  when  I  had  six  months 
of  forced  indolence  after  a  somewhat  serious  illness, 
Boswell  was  my  constant  companion  and  contributed 
more  than  anything  to  my  ultimate  recovery.  And, 
as  everyone  has  pointed  out,  Doctor  Johnson  is  the 
eighteenth  century  in  epitome ;  no  other  age  did  or 
could  produce  him.  In  him  is  wrapt  up  all  the  Augustan 
splendid  sanity — its  intolerance  of  cant,  its  magnificent 
common- sense  (tempered  in  his  case  by  a  melancholy 
wisdom) ;  its  inimitable  humour  and  avoidance  of  dull- 
ness ;   its  direct  vision,  which  has  been  mistaken  more 


52  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

often  than  not  for  jDlatitudinising  ;  its  habit  of  saying 
outright  what  pleased  and  what  displeased  it,  regardless 
of  quaint  rulings  of  other  ages  ;  its  inflexible  rigidity  of 
principle,  combined  with  a  very  real  charity  ;  its  wide 
knowledge,  which  has  no  sort  of  affinity  with  pedantry  ; 
its  curiosity,  mingled  with  a  wholesome  scepticism  ;  its 
indomitable  courage,  coupled  with  that  mysterious 
charm  which  so  many  of  us  for  so  long  a  time  have  held 
up  to  ridicule  or  scorned  as  being  too  childish  for  these 
latter  days  of  wisdom. 

Doctor  Johnson  is  John  Bull  as  we  like  to  fancy 
him,  not  as  travestied  in  the  Press — superstitious, 
weak-kneed,  maudlin  or  scandalmongering — but  stead- 
fast, robust,  intellectual,  religious,  and  not  ashamed  of 
being  thought  so  ;  companionable,  witty  and  courteous 
(I  repeat,  courteous  ;  think  of  the  doctor's  famous 
epigram  to  Mrs  Siddons  or  his  treatment  of  the  inmates 
of  his  house)  ;  and  it  is  not  only  Johnson  the  man 
whom  we  meet  in  Boswell,  but  the  Johnson  of  The 
Rambler,  of  The  Vanity  of  Human  Wishes,  of  Rasselas, 
of  The  Lives  of  the  Poets  and  The  Preface  to  Shakespeare  ; 
Johnson  the  writer,  with  whom  Mr  Saintsbury  would 
have  us  intimate.  The  legend  that  it  is  the  man,  and 
not  the  writer,  who  is  able  to  afford  us  such  a  perfect 
rest  and  refreshment  is  utterly  and  radically  erroneous. 
We  ought  to  reread  his  works  as  well  as  to  listen  to 
his  inimitable  remarks.  I  would  go  even  farther  and 
suggest  that  we  no  longer  deride  Johnson  as  a  critic. 
Within  his  very  obvious  limitations  he  is  not  only  a 
good,  but  a  great,  critic.  I  know  few  more  illuminating, 
and  no  more  refreshing,  pieces  of  criticism  than  his 
remarks  on  Shakespeare.  That  he  disliked  blank  verse 
is  very  plain — he  admits  it ;  and,  after  all,  every  man 
is  entitled  to  his  own  opinion.  The  question  is,  taking 
all  his  idiosyncrasies  into  account,  whether  or  not  he 


THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY  53 

does  shed  light  upon  the  works  of  the  man  whom  he 
discusses.     I  answer  unhesitatingly — yes. 

Of  Johnson's  companions,  Goldsmith,  of  course, 
stands  out  most  prominently.  For  pure  amusement 
and  refreshment  it  would,  indeed,  be  hard  to  name  a 
more  ideal  companion.  The  most  lovable  of  men  in 
himself,  his  prose  style  has  been  the  never-ending  charm 
of  all  generations  since ;  its  perfect  simplicity,  its 
pellucid  clarity  and  light  humour  have  been  the  envy  of 
all  writers  since.  It  is  impossible  to  analyse  it ;  it  is 
sheer  gossamer.  But  it  is  Goldsmith's  versatility  that 
is  so  amazing.  He  will  write  you  a  comedy,  over  which 
even  a  schoolboy  will  shriek  with  delight  as  he  reads  it 
to  himself  ;  verses  polished,  descriptive,  direct  and  even 
poignant ;  essays  for  which  we  cannot  find  high  enough 
praise ;  a  novel  which  still  pleases  and  amuses  every 
reader  of  whatever  age  ;  and  even  histories  of  various 
kinds,  which  are  a  constant  joy  to  anyone  who  is  ever 
lucky  enough  to  unearth  one  in  a  second-hand  bookshop. 

You  can  be  sure  of  amusement,  of  absolute  recreation 
and  of  perfect  rest,  whenever  you  pick  up  any  one  of  the 
works  of  this  astonishing  Irishman.  And  so  we  come 
to  a  branch  of  literature  which  even  the  most  blase  and 
"  modernist "  of  the  moderns  will  allow  to  be  the 
eighteenth  century's  peculiar  gift — the  art  of  letter- 
writing.  There  must  be  something  more  than  the 
modern  restlessness  and  hurry,  the  invention  of  tele- 
phone and  telegraph  to  account  for  the  rapid  decay  of 
this  fascinating  department  of  the  kingdom  of  literature. 
Whatever  the  cause,  it  is  an  established  fact  that  never 
before  nor  since,  in  any  age,  have  we  had  letters  to  com- 
pare with  those  of  Lady  Mary  Wortley  Montagu,  Swift, 
Pope,  Horace  Walpole,  Chesterfield,  Cowper  and  Gray. 
What  a  magnificent  orgy  is  conjured  up  by  the  mere 
mention  of  these  names  !     We  take  up  a  volume  of  any 


54  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

one  of  them,  and  hours  afterwards  may  still  be  found 
glutting  ourselves  with  their  witticisms,  their  pictures  of 
the  life  and  manners  of  their  times,  their  delightful  anec- 
dotes and  the  thousand  and  one  things  about  them  that 
attract  us.  Lady  Mary,  with  her  wonderful  description 
of  life  in  Turkey  and  admonitions  about  her  husband's 
prospects ;  Lord  Chesterfield,  with  his  never-failing 
Attic  salt  and  acumen,  trying  to  model  a  perfect  man  of 
the  world  ;  Horace  Walpole  (to  me  the  most  interesting 
of  all,  and  to  Mr  Saintsbury  so  important  that  he 
recommends  these  ten  volumes  as  a  vithirdsman"  to 
the  Bible  and  Shakespeare),  with  his  abounding  vitality 
and  endlessly  refreshing  kaleidoscope  of  current  events, 
portraying  the  history  of  his  time  more  exactly  than  any 
historian  could  ever  hope  to  ;  Gray,  with  his  scholarly 
and  scientifically  inclined  investigations,  keeping  his 
eye  on  the  object  like  the  true  poet  that  he  was  ;  and 
Cowper,  most  popular  of  all,  with  his  pen  pictures 
coined  from  nothing  at  all,  able  to  interest  us  quietly, 
sedately,  yet  withal  amusingly,  about  Olney,  his  garden, 
or  a  hare,  the  most  exquisite  small  beer — all  these 
afford  us  a  garden  with  never-ending  j3leasances  and 
arbours,  to  which  we  can  retire  with  absolute  certitude 
that  we  shall  return  to  the  whirl  of  our  daily  round 
reinvigorated,  full  of  new  ideas,  all  our  tangled  skeins 
unravelled,  and  quietly  confident  because  of  our  new- 
found peace.  And  wherein  lies  the  magic  of  these 
peculiarly  eighteenth-century  letter- writers  ?  Is  it  not 
in  the  unfailing  good  sense,  the  inevitable  good  temper, 
the  obvious  leisured  ease  of  the  authors  and  the  genuine 
interest  betrayed  and  aroused  in  all  sorts  of  different 
things  ?  Nowhere  did  the  century  find  so  natural  an 
outlet  for  its  genius  as  in  this  art,  and  to  neglect  these 
letter-writers  is  to  miss  a  very  considerable  portion  of 
the  spice  of  life. 


THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY  55 

Of  Gibbon  and  Burke  Mr  Saintsbury  says  but  little ; 
he  recognises  the  refreshing  qualities  of  The  Decline  and 
Fall,  but  he  by  no  means  does  justice  to  the  gorgeous 
rhetoric  of  our  noblest  statesmen.  Lawyers  invariably 
tell  me  that  they  always  look  on  a  man  who  doesn't 
know  his  Burke  as  only  half  educated,  and  certainly  I 
have  derived  more  considerable  aesthetic  refreshment 
from  the  speeches  on  India,  France  and  America  than 
in  any  writers  of  a  like  kind  in  any  language.  To  some 
extent  a  novel  depreciation  of  Sheridan  has  of  late  set 
in.  There  were  better  things  written  between  1700 
and  1798  than  his  three  plays,  and  critics  wax  angry 
because  we  don't  read  them  ;  but  that  ought  not  to 
blind  them  to  the  fact  that  in  their  class  these  comedies 
stand  alone,  and  have  been  the  constant  delight  of  all 
playgoers  and  readers  ever  since.  No  one  in  his  senses 
would  deny  that  he  gains  a  very  definite  sense  of  rest 
and  refreshment  after  seeing  or  rereading  the  comedies 
of  Sheridan  or  Goldsmith  ;  the  stage,  without  these  two 
in  this  century,  would  have  been  poor  indeed.  But  all 
this  time  there  has  been  an  undercurrent  of  revolt 
against  the  tenets  of  the  Augustan  school ;  The  Fugitives 
from  the  Happy  Valley  were  headed,  of  course,  by  Gray 
and  Collins,  who,  in  spite  of  their  personified  abstrac- 
tions, handed  on  a  very  definite  torch  to  Wordsworth 
himself. 

Collins,  in  particular,  had  that  peculiar  dream  quality, 
that  touch  of  pure  lyrical  softness,  which  haunts  us  in 
the  later  romantics.  He  at  least  breaks  with  a  school 
which  aims  at  neatness  and  polish  and  common-sense 
above  all  else.  How  Sleep  the  Brave  and  The  Ode  to 
Evening  need  no  relative  eulogy ;  they  are  absolute, 
final,  ineffably  graceful  and  sweet.  Macpherson's 
Ossian  is,  I  fear,  still  caviare  to  the  general,  but  its  popu- 
larity and  influence  were  once  widespread  throughout 


56  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

Europe.  The  point  is  that  this  verse-prose,  with 
its  breath  of  the  blue  mountains  of  Skye  and  the 
Hebrides  and  magic  vagueness,  shows  yet  another 
cleavage  from  the  school  of  Pope.  But  it  is  when  we 
come  to  Percy's  Reliques  (1765),  the  most  epoch-making 
book  that  appeared  between  1700  and  1798,  that  we  see 
the  first  real  glimmerings  of  the  great  dawn  of  the 
Romantic  revival.  How  good  it  must  have  been  for 
the  eighteenth  century  to  read  Sir  Cauline,  Sir  Patrick 
Speits  and  The  Nut  Brown  Maid.  It  would,  we  feel, 
have  been  worth  while  to  have  lived  at  that  period, 
ordinarily  ignorant,  and  suddenly  to  have  come  across 
a  copy  fresh  from  the  press.  No  wonder  Scott  raved 
so  about  it.  I  never  met  anyone,  boy  or  man,  who  was 
not  in  raptures  over  it  when  it  was  first  brought  to  his 
notice. 

It  is  difficult  to  analyse  the  charm  which  ballad 
poetry  exercises  over  us  ;  the  fact  remains  that  we 
would  part  with  many  precious  heritages  before  we 
would  consent  to  lose  Chevy  Chase,  The  Battle  of  Otter  - 
bourne.  Young  Waters  and  so  on.  It  is  hardly  necessary 
at  this  time  of  day  to  recommend  people  who  are  in 
need  of  rest  and  refreshment  to  go  back  to  the  ballad, 
but  it  is  worth  noticing  that  it  is  to  the  eighteenth 
century  that  we  owe  its  revival  and  consequent 
popularity.  Chatterton's  Ballade  of  Excellent  Charity 
and  Smart's  Song  to  David  will  never  fail  to  provide 
restful  pleasure  to  all  who  have  eyes  to  see  and  ears 
to  hear,  but  their  place  at  this  time  of  day  is  also 
well  assured.  And  so  we  arrive  at  the  setting  of  the 
Augustan  sun.  Cowper,  almost  as  versatile  as  Gold- 
smith, we  already  know  as  a  letter-writer.  His  hymns 
stand  out  as  the  finest  we  possess,  his  John  Gilpin  and 
The  Task  scarcely  need  mention  here,  but  it  is  perhaps 
permissible  once  more  to  draw  attention  to  the  import- 


THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY  57 

ance  of  Yardley  Oak,  which  certainly  contains  matters 
entirely  foreign  to  the  earlier  writers  in  the  century. 
Here  we  have  the  imaginative  envisagement  of  every- 
thing, the  half-pantheistic  feeling  of  the  community  of 
man  and  Nature  and  God,  which  is  so  perfectly  developed 
later  on  in  Wordsworth.  In  all  his  poems,  however, 
there  is  the  same  peacefulness  and  quiet  humour  which 
are  so  necessary  for  those  in  search  of  rest. 

We  feel,  on  laying  down  The  Peace  of  the  Augustans, 
that  Mr  Saintsbury  has  conferred  upon  the  State  a  real 
benefit,  for  there  never  was  a  time  when  we  all  of  us  so 
sorely  needed  all  that  the  eighteenth  century  has  to  give 
us — level-headedness,  a  sense  of  humour,  a.  sense  of 
quiet,  even  though  oppressed  and  weighed  down  by 
innumerable  troubles,  robust  strength,  an  avoidance  of 
thinking  too  precisely  on  the  event — all  these  and  many 
more  are  the  gifts  which  this  age  has  to  bestow.  It  is 
all  the  more  difficult  when  we  feel  so  grateful  for  such 
a  piece  of  criticism  to  have  to  comment  adversely  on 
many  features,  but,  in  common  fairness  to  ourselves,  a 
word  must  be  added  on  the  reverse  side. 

Never  before  can  there  have  been  such  an  astute 
literary  critic  who  wrote  so  deplorably  as  Mr  Saintsbury. 
His  style  has  long  been  recognised  as  almost  as  bad  as 
his  criticisms  are  good,  but  in  this  book  he  has  "  out- 
Saintsburied  Saintsbury,"  which  must  weigh  with 
university  lecturers  before  they  take  the  responsibility 
of  advocating  this  book  as  a  text-book  of  criticism. 
Furthermore,  he  is  a  Tory  of  the  Tories,  and  obviously 
prefers  a  political  fight  to  all  the  literature  there  ever 
was.  Like  many  others  of  his  belief,  he  is  unable  to 
understand  the  moderns,  and  consequently  reviles 
them  most  unjustly.  Lastly,  and  most  important  of 
all,  we  close  this  book  with  a  feeling  that  he  himself 
does  actually  prefer  the  low-lying  levels  of  the  Augustan 


58  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

poets  to  the  sublime  heights  of  Keats,  Shelley  and 
Wordsworth.  We  feel  that  we  have  been  cheated  by  a 
very  clever  counsel,  who  insidiously  recommends  that, 
for  our  sanity's  sake,  wre  should  try  his  prescription  of 
eighteenth-century  literature  ;  and,  when  he  has  us  in 
his  clutches,  he  would  have  us  leave  all  our  glories  of  sea 
and  sky  and  mountain,  and  stay  with  him  in  this  field 
of  very  limited  vision  for  ever. 

The  clever  reader  will  take  Mr  Saintsbury's  advice 
gladly  for  a  cure,  but,  when  he  is  rested,  he  will  rise 
again  like  a  giant  refreshed  with  wine  and  come  back 
to  the  present  age,  ready  to  fight  afresh  for  the  new  ideals 
and  the  twentieth-century  theory  of  life  and  letters, 
which  anyone  less  biased  than  Mr  Saintsbury  will  allow 
are  incomparably  finer  than  those  of  the  nineteenth  and 
totally  beyond  the  ken  of  the  very  earthy  schemers  of 
the  eighteenth  century. 


Ill 

SOME   MODERN    POETS 

WHEN  Mr  Marsh  first  collected  the  poems 
most  representative  of  his  age  in  1912,  he 
kindly  provided  the  critic  with  a  beacon- 
light  by  quoting  the  following  passage  from  Lord 
Dunsany  : — 

Of  all  materials  for  labour,  dreams  are  the  hardest ;  and 
the  artificer  in  ideas  is  the  chief  of  workers,  who  out  of 
nothing  will  make  a  piece  of  work  that  may  stop  a  child  from 
crying  or  lead  nations  to  higher  things.  For  what  is  it  to 
be  a  poet  ?  it  is  to  see  at  a  glance  the  glory  of  the  world, 
to  see  beauty  in  all  its  forms  and  manifestations,  to  feel 
ugliness  like  a  pain,  to  resent  the  wrongs  of  others  as  bitterly 
as  one's  own,  to  know  mankind  as  others  know  single  men, 
to  know  nature  as  botanists  know  a  flower,  to  be  thought  a 
fool,  to  hear  at  moments  the  clear  voice  of  God. 

This  brave  venture  appeared  just  at  a  time  when 
there  was  literally  no  sale  whatever  for  poetry,  when 
Richard  Middleton  was  driven  to  commit  suicide 
because  he  could  make  no  headway  in  an  age  given  over 
to  materialism.  It  seemed  that  so  far  as  the  general 
public  was  concerned  poetry  was  at  its  nadir  ;  the  poet 
was,  in  Dunsany's  words,  truly  thought  to  be  a  fool ; 
yet  Mr  Marsh  persisted,  and,  as  we  now  know,  took  the 
tide  on  its  turn  ;  by  May,  1914,  this  slender  volume  had 
gone  into  its  tenth  edition  ;  poetry  had  come  into  its 
own  again. 

Cambridge  published  its  own  productions  in  verse, 

59 


60  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

Oxford  followed  suit ;  quite  normal  citizens  waited 
impatiently  for  fresh  issues  of  "  New  Numbers,"  so 
that  they  might  glut  themselves  with  the  poetry  of 
Wilfrid  Gibson,  Lascelles  Abercrombie  and  John 
Drinkwater ;  where  previously  John  Masefield  alone 
had  been  able  to  create  a  public  for  his  long  narrative 
poems,  now  every  new  poet  had  a  following,  a  coterie 
of  devoted  adherents.  Then  the  war  came,  and  with 
it  the  inevitable  reaction.  A  writer  of  doggerel  in 
one  of  the  halfpenny  papers  welcomed  a  new  age  of 
action  which  should  cause  us  to  turn  aside  from  this 
foolish  cult  of  reading  and  making  poetry  ;  Mr  Birrell 
publicly  announced  that  it  would  be  as  well  to  give 
poetry  the  "  go-by  "  until  after  the  war ;  publishers 
found  that  money  lay  in  war  books  ;  only  in  The  Times 
did  the  dying  Muse  dare  to  assert  herself,  and  there 
rarely  with  distinction  ;  silence  would  have  been  a 
swreeter  swan-song,  but  with  the  passage  of  days  the 
public  became  discontented  with  Secrets  of  the  Prussian 
Court ;  they  longed  for  some  seductive  writer  who 
would  carry  them  away  from  the  war  and  lure  them 
back  to  an  age  when  we  were  obsessed  by  less  weighty 
problems,  back  to  a  time  when  destruction  was  not  the 
world's  united  aim.  Reprints  of  the  great  master- 
pieces began  to  sell  again ;  the  modern  novelist  re- 
turned to  his  old  successful  niche ;  and  now  there  has 
come  about  a  reaction  even  against  the  six-shilling 
novel.  Poetry  which  but  a  little  time  ago  was  shunned 
by  every  canny  publisher  is  now  being  sought  by  them 
eagerly  ;  it  is  not  really  easy  to  discover  why. 

Most  of  us  can,  of  course,  understand  the  reason  for 
Rupert  Brooke's  enormous  success  ;  he  stood  alone, 
above  his  age,  as  one  who  expressed  finally  all  its  aims 
and  aspirations.  Everything  about  him  attracted 
something     in    each    of    us ;     his    brilliant    intellect 


SOME  MODERN  POETS  61 

captivated  some,  his  ruthless  realism  others,  his  sense 
of  beauty  ensnared  the  most  perhaps,  but  his  poetry 
lives  as  the  epitome  of  all  our  cravings  and  our 
strange  perplexities  ;  we  are  like  blind  children  in  the 
dark,  and  we  cling  to  a  slightly  stronger  brother  who 
can  yet,  for  all  that,  give  voice  to  our  agony  : 

Who  want  and  know  not  what  we  want  and  cry 
With  crooked  mouths  for  Heaven  and  throw  it  by. 

There  is  no  doubt,  too,  that  the  manner  of  his  death 
enticed  the  great  public  to  start  buying  and  even  read- 
ing his  work.  But  though  he  is  the  greatest,  he  is 
certainly  not  the  only  poet  whose  works  are  selling. 
We  hear  that  John  Oxenham's  Bees  in  Amber  and  AIVs 
Well  have  quite  outstripped  his  novels  in  circulation, 
that  Miss  M'Leod's  Songs  to  save  a  Soul  are  having  an 
immense  vogue,  that  Miss  Elinor  Jenkins  has  her 
thousands  of  readers  ;  all  our  public  and  secondary 
school  boys  and  girls  are  reading  with  great  keenness 
that  splendid  collection  of  contemporary  poetry  brought 
out  by  Messrs  Sidgwick  &  Jackson,  at  the  instigation  of 
the  English  Association,  entitled  Poems  of  To-day.  To 
these  we  have  now  to  add  daily  the  songs  of  dead  heroes 
of  the  type  of  Charles  Sorley,  Colwyn  Philipps,  and 
countless  others. 

All  these  are  signs  that  there  is  a  very  sure  renascence 
of  poetry  in  our  midst,  and  it  is  worth  while  trying  to 
find  out  what  are  the  leading  principles  of  its  pioneers 
and  whether  it  is  likely  to  be  ephemeral  or  lasting. 

We  expect  to  find  (and  are  not  disappointed)  all  the 
best  traits  and  most  characteristic  results  in  Mr  Marsh's 
second  volume  of  Georgian  Poetry,1  which  contains  all 
the  work  written  between  1913  and  1915  which  he  was 

1  Georgian  Poetry,  1913-1915.     The  Poetry  Bookshop,  191 5. 


62  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

allowed  to  reproduce  and  at  the  same  time  thought 
worthy  of  inclusion.  Taken  in  conjunction  with  his 
volume  of  three  years  earlier,  the  contrast  is  in  some 
ways  amazing. 

Most  of  the  present-day  critics  are  loud  in  their  pro- 
testations against  this  new  school ;  they  say  that  in 
their  passionate  revolt  against  the  Romantic  movement 
they  are  rapidly  working  into  a  groove  of  mechanical 
reaction  ;  that  there  is  a  danger  lest  their  convention 
become  only  a  worse  convention  than  that  of  the 
Victorians,  who  drew  beauty  for  its  own  sake  as  if  it  were 
interesting  quite  apart  from  what  is  made  of  it ;  worse 
in  that  the  young  poet  now  draws  ugliness  for  its  own 
sake,  though  it  neither  points  a  moral  nor  adorns  a 
tale. 

This  seems  to  be  the  one  handle  which  the  critic  turns 
unceasingly :  Rupert  Brooke  was  attacked  for  his 
realism  in  Jealousy,  Menelaus  and  Helen,  A  Channel 
Passage  and  innumerable  other  poems.  Even  those 
who  professed  themselves  among  his  most  fervid 
admirers  exclaimed  that  they  could  not  bear  the  intro- 
duction of  words  like  "  dirty  "  and  "  blear-eyed  "  into 
the  middle  of  poems  otherwise  beautiful.  What  such 
people  fail  to  realise  is  that  in  his  search  for  beauty  the 
true  poet  must  occasionally  find  himself  confronted  by 
ugliness  ;  he  refuses  to  shut  his  eyes  to  it ;  he  knows 
it  to  be  monstrous,  unreasonable  and  yet  almost  a 
commonplace  to  less  sensitive,  saner  minds  who  can 
accustom  themselves  to  the  monstrous  and  gradually 
become  blind  to  it,  in  direct  proportion  as  they  become 
blind  to  the  beauty  all  around  them  ;  fearlessly  he  sets 
out  to  correlate  it  with  his  other  vision,  and  the  result 
is  to  alienate  men  and  women  of  weaker  stomachs  who 
imagine  that  he  dabbles  in  uncleanness  because  he 
likes  it. 


SOME  MODERN  POETS  68 

In  the  first,  and  in  some  ways  the  greatest,  poem  in 
this  new  volume,  King  Lear's  Wife,  Gordon  Bottomley 
has  given  such  critics  ground  for  complaint,  which  they 
have  not  been  slow  to  take. 

What  right,  they  ask,  has  a  poet  to  deduce  that  Lear 
in  his  earlier  life  was  wanton,  callous  and  neglectful  of 
his  wife,  making  mistresses  of  her  maidens  ? 

They  declare  that  this  is  a  play  of  great  beauty,  spoilt 
by  hideous  touches,  notably  by  lyrics  about  lice,  which 
have  nothing  to  do  with  the  great  Shakespearean 
tragedy.  In  point  of  fact,  anyone  who  has  for  years 
been  troubled  by  the  earlier  play  will  recognise  at  once 
how  much  the  new  one  clears  up  the  ground.  It  is 
impossible  to  reread  King  Lear  after  finishing  King 
Lear's  Wife  without  noticing  again  and  again  points 
that  used  to  puzzle  the  imagination,  now  made  perfectly 
plain.  Why  did  the  old  King,  in  his  madness,  burst 
forth  into  that  frenzied  speech  about  adultery  ?  There 
was  method  in  his  madness ;  there  always  is  in  Shake- 
speare's madness.  "  This  is  not  altogether  fool,  my 
Lord."  His  mind  casts  back  to  some  episode  in  his 
earlier  days,  to  Gormflaith  : 

Open  your  window  when  the  moon  is  dead. 

And  I  will  come  again. 

The  men  say  everywhere  that  you  are  faithless, 

The  women  say  your  face  is  a  false  face 

And  your  eyes  shifty  eyes.     Ah,  but  I  love  you,  Gormflaith. 

The  following  passage  sheds  an  entirely  new  light  on  the 
relationship  existing  between  Cordelia  and  her  much 
older  sisters  : — 

Because  a  woman  gives  herself  for  ever, 
Cordeil  the  useless  had  to  be  conceived 
To  keep  her  father  from  another  woman. 


64  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

Does  it  not  help  us  in  our  differentiation  between 
Goneril  and  Regan  that  Goneril  is  here  shown  firm, 
wary,  swift  and  secret,  the  virgin  huntress,  harsh  in 
her  purity,  one  lustful  to  kill  but  one  who  would  kill 
cleanly,  full  of  contempt  for  her  sister  : 

Does  Regan  worship  anywhere  at  dawn  ? 
The  sweaty,  half-clad  cook-maids  render  lard 
Out  in  the  scullery,  after  pig-killing, 
And  Regan  sidles  among  their  greasy  skirts, 
Smeary  and  hot  as  they,  for  craps  to  suck.   .   .   . 

She  kills  her  father's  mistress  and  so  obtains  an  ascend- 
ancy over  him  which  she  never  after  loses.  "  I  thought 
she  had  been  broken  long  ago,"  says  Lear  hi  his  last 
speech.  "  She  must  be  wedded  and  broken  ;  I  cannot 
do  it."  What  a  blaze  of  sudden  light  this  throws  on 
Goneril  as  we  have  known  her  only  in  her  later  days. 
We  gained  some  insight  into  Mr  Gordon  Bottomley's 
poetic  vision  in  the  earlier  volume,  but  in  King  Leafs 
Wife  he  may,  without  hyperbole,  be  said  to  have  arrived. 
Mr  Marsh  is  not  wrong  when  he  speaks  of  the  honour 
which  the  author  has  done  to  the  book  by  allowing  his 
play  to  be  published  for  the  first  time  there.  All 
readers  at  once  feel  impatient  on  coming  to  the  end 
that  they  cannot  at  once  rush  out  and  see  it  acted. 

The  quiet  sadness  of  the  neglected  dying  queen,  the 
savagery  of  Lear,  the  freshness  of  the  cold  Goneril,  the 
tragedy  of  Cordeil,  the  lullaby  with  which  Hygd  is 
hushed  to  sleep  : 

The  owlets  in  roof  holes     Can  sing  for  themselves  ; 
The  smallest  brown  squirrel     Both  scampers  and  delves; 
But  a  baby  does  nothing — She  never  knows  how — 
She  must  hark  to  her  mother     Who  sings  to  her  now  ; 

the  love-making  of  Gormflaith  : 


SOME  MODERN  POETS  65 

It  is  a  lonely  thing  to  love  a  king, 

Life  holds  no  more  than  this  for  me  :  this  is  my  hour ; 

her  singing  in  the  garden,  her  premonition  of 
approaching  disaster  all  go  to  prove  that  Mr 
Bottomley  has  here  touched  high-water  mark. 

No  one  would  deny  that  there  are  ugly  things  here 
and  there,  just  as  there  are  ugly  things  in  life,  but 
certainly  beauty  predominates.  GoneriPs  worship  on 
the  hills  at  dawn,  raising  up  her  "  shining  hand  in  cold 
stern  adoration  Even  as  the  first  great  gleam  went  up 
the  sky,"  her  lament  over  the  body  of  her  mother  : 

This  is  not  death  :  death  could  not  be  like  this.   .  .   . 

I  did  not  know  death  could  come  all  at  once. 

Come  back  :  come  back  ;  the  things  I  have  not  done 

Beat  in  upon  my  brain  from  every  side  .  .  . 

If  I  could  have  you  now  I  could  act  well  .   .  . 

My  inward  life,  deeds  that  you  have  not  known, 

I  burn  to  tell  you  in  a  sudden  dread 

That  now  your  ghost  discovers  them  in  me  : 

all  these  are  beautiful,  beautiful  not  with  an  exotic 
richness  that  hides  its  meaning  under  a  magic  rhythm, 
but  beautiful  with  the  inevitable  simplicity  of  the 
Anglo-Saxon,  monosyllabic  yet  haunting.  It  is  their 
very  directness,  their  terse,  uncompromising,  actual, 
everyday  speech  that  first  attracts  us  in  all  these  new 
writers.  Mr  Bottomley  does  not  strive  to  heighten  his 
effect  by  the  introduction  of  the  quaint  or  the  remote  ; 
he  is  almost  Blake-like  in  his  choice  of  phrases.  The 
result  is  that  he  has  written  a  play  which  will  remain  in 
the  memory  (in  spite  of  the  weak  machinery  of  the 
laying-out  women  which  we  could  well  have  spared)  as 
long  as  any  we  have  ever  read.  It  is  a  fine  achieve- 
ment, not  the  least  fine  part  of  its  great  attraction  lying 


66  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

in  that  direct,  straightforward  simplicity  which  is  the 
keynote  to  the  whole  volume. 

Rupert  Brooke  occupies  the  second  place  of  honour, 
and  we  are  here  given  valuable  glimpses  of  his  later 
development. 

In  Tiare  Tahiti  we  find  him  rebelling  once  more 
against  the  Paradise  of  the  Wise  :  he  is  so  much  in  love 
with  material  beauty,  "  Miri's  laugh,  Teipo's  feet,  and 
the  hands  of  Matua,  Mamua,  your  lovelier  head  "... 
that  he  cannot  reconcile  himself  to  the  idea  that  in 
another  life  there  might  be  richness  of  life  without 
matter  and  the  individuality  of  matter  : 

How  shall  we  wind  these  wreaths  of  ours, 
Where  there  are  neither  heads  nor  flowers  ? 

"  There's  little  comfort  in  the  wise,"  he  concludes.  To 
accentuate  this  point  further  there  is  also  included  The 
Great  Lover,  in  which  the  poet  shows  us  his  overpower- 
ing passion  for  the  beauty  of  the  ordinary  things  of  life  : 

White  plates  and  cups,  clean-gleaming, 
Ringed  with  blue  lines  .  .  .  new-peeled  sticks 
And  shining  pools  on  grass. 

His  great  regret  is  that  they  cannot  accompany  him  into 
the  life  hereafter.  His  scintillating  wit  is  shown  by  the 
inclusion  of  Heaven,  in  which  the  poet  frames  a  religion 
and  a  view  of  the  Beyond  for  fish  ;  a  poem  compact  of 
bitter,  caustic  irony  relieved  by  an  exquisite  humour. 
One  war  sonnet  and  two  more  on  the  subject  of  the  after- 
life complete  the  extracts  from  one  of  the  greatest  poets 
of  our  time ;  they  are  certainly  representative  and  ought 
to  drive  anyone  who  has  not  yet  read  all  Brooke's  work 
(if  any  such  exist)  to  remedy  this  deficiency.  He  who 
has  given  expression  to  all  the  insatiable  yearnings  of 


SOME  MODERN  POETS  67 

his  age  deserves  not  only  its  gratitude  but  its  undying 
love. 

Mr  William  H.  Davies  is  one  of  those  contributors 
whose  work  seems  to  me  to  have  deteriorated  with  the 
passing  years  «  he  is  still  the  singer  of  the  hedgerows  : 

And  I'll  be  dreaming  of  green  lanes, 
Where  little  things  with  beating  hearts 
Hold  shining  eyes  between  the  leaves, 
Till  men  with  horses  pass,  and  carts. 

He  is  just  as  charming  and  as  naively  simple  as  he  used 
to  be,  but  there  seems  to  be  nothing  behind  it  all ;  it  is 
beautiful  but  flimsy  ;  it  seems  almost  at  times  as  if  he 
had  exhausted  his  theme  ;   only  in 

Sweet  Stay-at-Home,  sweet  Well-content, 
Sweet  Stay-at-Home,  sweet  Love-one-place 

does  the  richness  of  the  lilt  satisfy  us,  and  we  are  con- 
tent for  the  moment  to  be  without  that  philosophy 
which  we  now  all  demand  from  those  who  would  inspire 
us. 

Mr  Walter  de  la  Mare  is  still  master  of  that  fairy 
language  that  captivated  us  so  surely  in  the  previous 
volume.     None  of  us  has  forgotten  the  charm  of 

"  Is  there  anybody  there?  "  said  the  Traveller, 
Knocking  on  the  moonlit  door. 

It  is  not  likely  that  we  shall  soon  forget  The  Mocking 
Fairy  of  the  new  volume  : 

"  Won't  you  look  out  of  your  window,  Mrs  Gill  ?  " 

Quoth  the  Fairy,  nidding,  nodding,  in  the  garden ; 


68  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

nor  the  delicate,  fantastic  joy  in  Off  the  Ground  : 

Three  jolly  Farmers 

Once  bet  a  pound 
Each  dance  the  others  would 

Off  the  ground. 
One — Two — Three  ! 

And  away  they  go, 
Not  too  fast, 

And  not  too  slow  ; 

of  their  progress  through 

Withy — Wellover — 
Wassop — Wo  .   .   . 

until  at  last  they  reach  the  great  green  sea,  whereupon 
Farmer  Tovey  joins  the  mermaids  and  wins  the  bet. 
Mr  de  la  Mare  seems  to  make  poetry  for  the  pure  delight 
of  rhyming,  for  the  sheer  ecstasy  of  hearing  words 
bubble  like  a  mountain  burn  :  the  irresponsibility  of 
childhood,  infants'  happy  laughter — these  are  the  things 
that  his  poetry  brings  back  to  us  ;  we  forget  the  scheme 
and  order  of  life,  its  myriad  perplexities  ;  we  are  content 
simply  to  sit  spellbound  and  listen  ;  here,  at  least,  is 
happiness  of  a  sort. 

John  Drink  water  is  a  poet  of  very  brilliant  calibre. 
He  has  certainly  never  before  risen  to  the  height  that  he 
reaches  in  The  Carver  in  Stone  of  this  volume  ;  here  one 
may  read  exactly  what  is  the  impelling  force  that  guides 
the  young  genius  of  to-day  ;  this  Carver  with  eyes 

Grey,  like  the  drift  of  twitch-fires  blown  in  June, 
That,  without  fearing,  searched  if  any  wrong 
Might  threaten  from  your  heart 

is  fct  Every-poet  "  of  the  Georgian  age  ;  he  is  talking  of 
himself : 


SOME  MODERN  POETS  69 

Slowly  out  of  the  dark  confusion,  spread 

By  life's  innumerable  venturings 

Over  his  brain,  he  would  triumph  into  the  light 

Of  one  clear  mood,  unblemished  of  the  blind 

Legions  of  errant  thought  that  cried  about 

His  rapt  seclusion.   .   .   . 

Here  we  find  ourselves  again  in  the  atmosphere  of 
Rupert  Brooke ;  the  sense  of  adventure,  the  sense  of 
an  eternal  yearning  after  self-expression,  the  brave 
attempt  to  leave  something  behind  us  which  will  last 
long  enough  to  show  those  who  shall  come  after  that 
in  spite  of  multitudinous  futilities  there  is  much  fine 
stuff  intermingled  with  the  dross  of  the  world  if  we 
could  only  see  it  and  translate  it  into  real  metal ;  but 
the  Carver  cannot  bear  the  travesties  which  pass  for 
sound  workmanship  with  the  crowd  : 

Figures  of  habit  driven  on  the  stone 
By  chisels  governed  by  no  heat  of  the  brain, 
But  drudges  of  hand  that  moved  by  easy  rule. 
Proudly  recorded  mood  was  none,  no  thought 
Plucked  from  the  dark  battalions  of  the  mind 
And  throned  in  everlasting  sight. 

Worst  of  all  are  the  critics,  wise 

With  words,  weary  of  custom  and  eyes  askew 
That  watched  their  neighbour's  face  for  any  news 
Of  the  best  way  of  judgment,  till,  each  sure 
None  would  determine  with  authority, 
All  spoke  in  prudent  praise. 

Sickened  by  the  inanity  of  the  judges,  when  he  is 
bidden  to  reshape  his  chosen  god  along  the  walls  of  the 
temple  together  with  all  his  fellow-craftsmen,  he  seizes 
on  the  idea  of  carving  a  queer,  puff-bellied  toad,  with 
eyes  that  always  stared  sidelong  at  heaven  and  saw  no 


70  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

heaven  there.  This  toad  seemed  to  him  to  stand  for  an 
emblem  of  his  kings  and  priests  ;  he  loathed  the  false 
work  of  his  colleagues  that  passed  for  true  and  so  deter- 
mined that  his  truth  should  not  be  doomed  to  inarch 
among  this  falsehood  to  the  ages.  So  he  chose  a 
secluded  spot  and  there  fashioned  his  toad,  and  round 
it  his  people's  gods,  tigers,  bats  and  owls  .  .  .  "  all 
signs  of  sightless  thought  adventuring  the  host  that  is 
mere  spirit  "  ;  his  leopard  became  "  fear  in  flight  before 
accusing  faith,"  his  bull  bore  "  the  burden  of  the  patient 
of  the  earth." 

And  other  than  the  gods  he  made  .   .  .  the  stalks 

Of  bluebells  heavy  with  the  news  of  spring,  .   .  . 

All  were  deftly  ordered,  duly  set  .   .  . 

Till  on  the  wall,  out  of  the  sullen  stone, 

A  glory  blazed,  his  vision  manifest, 

His  wonder  captive.     And  he  was  content. 

In  this  poem  we  are  made  to  feel  all  the  wild,  un- 
satisfied longings  of  the  would-be  creator,  the  ecstatic 
joy  of  him  who  builds  for  eternity,  the  paean  of  triumph 
of  the  man  who  has  risen  superior  to  all  the  little 
empty  world  of  critics  and  out  of  the  crucible  of 
his  mind  has  formed  and  perfected  solid,  substantial, 
lasting  beauty.  It  stands  as  the  victorious  anthem 
of  the  poet  of  our  era  whose  hand  has  found  at 
last  something  worthy  to  do  and  is  doing  it  with  all 
his  power,  knowing  full  well  that  he  is  building  for 
eternity  and  in  the  serenity  of  his  might  content  with 
that. 

No  more  shall  we  hear  the  cry  of  the  restless  spirit 
of  Brooke,  no  more  will  the  sweet,  exotic  flavour 
of  Flecker's  Eastern  poems  lull  our  senses  in  these 
volumes  ;  of  these  two  we  take  our  farewell  here,  and 
deep  indeed  is  our  regret.     Widely  differing  as  these 


SOME  MODERN  POETS  71 

poets  were,  they  both  attracted  much  the  same  lovers. 
Who  could  resist  the  metre  of  Yasmin  ? 

But  when  the  silver  dove  descends  I  find  the  little  flower  of 

friends 
Whose  very  name  that  sweetly  ends  I  say  when  I  have  said, 

Yasmin. 

Though  perhaps  it  sounds  a  grotesque  simile,  the  triple 
rhyme  in  this  metre  strikes  exactly  the  same  chord  as 
is  struck  by  the  noise  of  a  railway  engine  when  it  is 
starting  out  of  a  station ;  it  is  attractive,  though  some- 
how it  ought  to  be  ugly.  We  hear  the  throb  of  the 
engine  again  in  The  Gates  of  Damascus  : 

The  dragon-green,  the  luminous,  the  dark,  the  serpent- 
haunted  sea, 

The  snow-besprinkled  wine  of  earth,  the  white  and  blue 
flower  foaming  sea. 

Unlike  most  of  his  school,  Flecker  relies  for  effect  on 
strange  words  and  Oriental  names  ;  there  is  more  of 
Keats  in  his  beauty  than  in  most  of  his  younger  con- 
temporaries. As  a  master  of  metre  and  lyrical  expres- 
sion he  stood  high  among  his  companions,  as  can  be 
seen  in  The  Dying  Patriot : 

Noon  strikes  on  England,  noon  on  Oxford  town, 

— Beauty  she  was  statue  cold — there's  blood  upon  her  gown. 

Noon  of  my  dreams,  O  noon  ! 
Proud  and  goodly  kings  had  built  her,  long  ago, 
With  her  towers  and  tombs  and  statues  all  arow, 
With  her  fair  and  floral  air  and  the  love  that  lingers  there, 

And  the  streets  where  the  great  men  go  ! 

No  more  beautiful  poem  has  been  written  since  the  war 
began.  And  now  he  can  sing  to  us  no  more.  One  more 
apostle  of  beauty  is  lost  to  us  just  when  we  needed 
him  most. 


72  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

No  one  who  had  read  The  Hare  of  Wilfrid  Gibson  in 
1912  doubted  but  that  he  had  a  rare  gift  of  dramatic, 
musical  self-expression,  but  in  Hoops  he  has  outgrown 
any  puerilities  of  which  he  might  then  have  been  justi- 
fiably accused.  Here  again  we  have  the  passionate 
love  of  beauty,  this  time  beauty  of  form,  as  desired  by 
a  mis-stitched,  gnarled,  crooked  stableman  and  odd-job 
man  attached  to  a  travelling  circus  : 

I've  always  worshipped  the  body,  all  my  life — 

The  body,  quick  with  the  perfect  health  which  is  beauty, 

Lively,  lissom,  alert  .   .  . 

The  living  God  made  manifest  in  man. 

Wilfrid  Gibson  seems  to  owe  something  of  his  easy, 
colloquial  style  in  verse  to  Masefield's  longer  narrative 
poems  ;  he  seems — alone  in  this  book — to  be  carrying 
on  that  tradition  which  threatened  to  become  an  ob- 
session amongst  our  poetasters  before  the  war.  But 
Wilfrid  Gibson  has  something  to  say  ;  he  does  "  see 
beauty  in  all  its  forms  and  manifestations' ';  he  certainly 
does,  more  almost  than  all  the  others,  "  feel  ugliness  like 
a  pain  "  ;  though  he  does  not  shut  his  eyes  to  it,  as  all 
those  who  have  read  his  short  volume  of  war  poems 
know. 

Ralph  Hodgson  is  a  new-comer,  and  all  true  lovers  of 
poetry  will  welcome  him  with  open  arms,  for  he  has 
come  to  stay.  Time,  you  old  Gypsy  Man,  we  regret  to 
see,  is  not  included  in  this  volume  ;  but  that,  after  all, 
is  obtainable  in  Poems  of  To-day.  We  certainly  could 
not  spare  either  of  the  two  of  his  poems  which  are  in- 
cluded. Many  people  prefer  The  Bull  to  anything  in 
the  book.  It  is  a  wonderful  piece  of  realism ;  the 
beauty  and  horror  of  the  jungle  permeate  every  line ; 
the  whole  poem  is  throbbing  with  life ;  it  reads  almost, 
as  someone  has  said,  as  if  it  were  written  by  one  bull 
about  another  :  we  seem  actuallv  to  see  him 


SOME  MODERN  POETS  73 

Standing  with  his  head  hung  down 
In  a  stupor,  dreaming  things : 
Green  savannas,  jungles  brown, 
Battlefields  and  bellowings, 
Bulls  undone  and  lions  dead 
And  vultures  flapping  overhead. 
Dreaming  things  :  of  days  he  spent 
With  his  mother  gaunt  and  lean 
In  the  valley  warm  and  green, 
Full  of  baby  wonderment 
Blinking  out  of  silly  eyes 
At  a  hundred  mysteries. 

.  .  .  and  now  he  is  deserted,  dying  .  .  .  and  has  to  turn 

From  his  visionary  herds 
And  his  splendid  yesterday, 
Turns  to  meet  the  loathly  birds 
Flocking  round  him  from  the  skies, 
Waiting  for  the  flesh  that  dies. 

Ralph  Hodgson  more  than  fulfils  Lord  Dunsany's 
definition  of  a  poet,  for  he  does  more  than  know  man- 
kind as  others  know  single  men ;  he  seems  to  know  the 
world  of  beasts  better  than  most  of  us  know  single  men. 
But  there  are  sure  to  be  some  to  whom  this  poem  will 
come  as  a  tour  de  force ;  they  will  acknowledge  its 
beauty  of  finish,  the  perfect  workmanship  that  went  to 
the  making  of  it,  but  they  will  deny  that  such  a  subject 
is  the  end  and  aim  of  poetry.  Let  such  readers  turn  to 
The  Song  of  Honour ;  there  will  they  find  a  universal 
hymn  of  thankfulness  from  all  the  world  that  should  be 
sung  on  the  hill-tops  by  every  lover  of  Nature  ;  it  is  the 
hosanna  of  all  created  things  : 

The  song  of  each  and  all  who  gaze 
On  Beauty  in  her  naked  blaze, 

Or  see  her  dimly  in  a  haze. 
The  song  of  all  not  wholly  dark, 
Not  wholly  sunk  in  stupor  stark 

Too  deep  for  groping  Heaven. 


74  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

All  the  songs  that  ever  man  sang  are  grouped  together 
here  and  poured  out  in  one  glorious  medley,  the  song  of 
every  singing  bird,  of  poets,  painters,  wise  men,  beggars, 
of  men  who  face  a  hopeless  hill  with  sparkling  and 
delight,  of  sailors,  fighters,  lovers,  of  men  whose  love 
of  motherland  is  like  a  dog's  for  one  dear  hand,  sole, 
selfless,  boundless,  blind  : 

The  song  of  men  all  sorts  and  kinds, 
As  many  tempers,  moods  and  minds 
As  leaves  are  on  a  tree. 

It  places  Mr  Hodgson  among  those  rare  singers  who  up- 
lift us  and  put  new  courage  in  our  hearts  by  reason  of 
their  sublime  joy  fulness ;  we  forget  the  real  genius  of 
his  lyricism  in  the  sheer  unreasoning  abandon  of  his 
theme.  He  makes  us,  too,  want  to  cry  out  with 
thankfulness  for  being  alive. 

Mr  D.  H.  Lawrence  is  a  poet  of  rigidity  ;  some  years 
ago  he  wrote  some  beautiful  verses  on  A  Schoolmaster  ; 
since  then  he  has  been  cursed  with  an  obsession  of  sex 
which  has  threatened  to  destroy  his  equipoise ;  he  still 
achieves  beauty  at  intervals,  but  there  is  an  under- 
current of  morbidity  which  disturbs  the  whole  true 
current  of  his  art.  You  see  it  most  plainly  here  in 
Cruelty  and  Love ;  somehow  he  always  leaves  us  with 
a  sense  that  Lust  is  at  the  back  of  both  his  Cruelty  and 
his  Love  ;  it  is  too  fleshly  altogether :  "  He  caresses  my 
mouth  with  his  fingers,  smelling  grim  Of  the  rabbit's 
fur."  The  girl  talks  of  her  lover  kt  nosing  like  a  stoat 
Who  sniffs  with  joy  before  he  drinks  the  blood."  It 
isn't  that  it  is  not  nice ;  it  is  much  worse  than  that ; 
it  is  not  artistically  true.  That  such  things  happen  in 
isolated  cases  does  not  justify  a  man  portraying  it  as  if 
it  were  a  universal  tendency  among  lovers ;  it  is  the 
more  distressing  because  in  Mr  Lawrence  we  have  a 


SOME  MODERN  POETS  75 

great  novelist  and  a  real  poet  losing  himself  in  the 
meshes  of  a  foolish  obsession. 

Mr  Francis  Ledwidge  is  the  other  new-comer;  he 
sings  sweetly,  cleanly  and  surely  on  A  Rainy  Day  in 
April.  He  is  the  singer  of  the  open  fields  and  may  (we 
hope  he  will)  carry  on  the  tradition  of  the  Mr  Davies  we 
used  to  know. 

The  only  selection  from  Mr  Masefield  is  not  really 
typical  of  the  last  two  years'  work  done  by  him,  but  it 
was  the  only  one  at  the  disposal  of  the  editor.  Prob- 
ably all  of  us  would  have  preferred  August  191 4  to  The 
Wanderer.  Still,  in  some  sense,  the  poem  only  goes 
to  prove  more  conclusively  than  ever  how  radically 
wrong  are  those  critics  who  imagine  that  these  realist 
poets  of  ours  are  not  just  as  desperately  serious  in 
their  search  for  beauty  as  the  most  romantic 
amongst  us. 

The  theme  of  the  poem  is  the  same  as  that  which 
runs  through  nearly  all  Mr  Masefield's  poetry — the 
power  of  beauty,  the  blindness  of  fate  : 

Blind  pieces  in  a  mighty  game  we  swing  : 
Life's  battle  is  a  conquest  for  the  strong ; 
The  meaning  shows  in  the  defeated  thing. 

There  is  the  same  true  workmanship  and  perfect 
execution  that  characterises  most  of  his  work,  but  in 
some  ways  he  seems  outside  the  scope  of  this  book  ; 
probably  it  is  because  we  were  reading  his  Poems  and 
Ballads  twelve  years  ago,  and  all  these  other  men  are 
more  or  less  new  to  us.  One  of  the  few  precious  cameos 
of  a  trifling  nature  which  this  book  contains  is  called 
Milk  for  the  Cat,  by  Harold  Monro  ;  it  is  rather  open 
to  question  whether  such  a  poem  is  quite  worthy  of 
inclusion ;  it  is  certainly  a  miracle  of  description,  but 
it  is,  after  all,  a  fantastic  trifle,  and  as  such  seems  to 


76  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

quite  a  number  of  people  to  be  out  of  place.  On  the 
other  hand,  the  theme  of  Children  of  Love  (the  infant 
Christ  and  the  child  Cupid)  is  most  delicately  handled, 
and  is  one  of  the  many  really  beautifully  conceived 
ideas  in  the  volume. 

The  criticism  which  we  applied  to  Mr  W.  H.  Davies 
applies  almost  equally  to  Mr  James  Stephens  ;  we  all 
went  into  rhapsodies  over  The  Crock  of  Gold  and  over 
parts  of  Here  are  Ladies,  but  his  art  was  too  precious  to 
be  roughly  handled  ;  somehow  he  seems  to  have  lost 
for  the  moment  his  faery  touch,  his  glorious  sense  of 
humour ;  much  the  same  has  happened  to  his  verse. 
There  was  infinitely  more  real  poetry  in  his  contribu- 
tion to  the  1912  volume  than  there  can  be  said  to  be  in 
the  present  one  ;  he  has  melody  and  facility  ;  he  is  in 
touch  with  Nature  himself,  but  he  is  unable  to  make  us 
realise  quite  how  Nature  affects  him ;  his  simplicity 
makes  the  poverty  underlying  his  words  more  than  ever 
evident ;  there  is  not  enough  reality  to  make  us  love 
him,  probably  because  we  in  our  overburdened  lives 
have  somehow  got  past  that  childish  ingenuousness 
and  cannot  tolerate  it  any  longer ;  so  many  of 
us  have  had  to  grow  up  in  the  last  two  or  three 
years. 

The  volume  ends,  as  it  begins,  with  a  play  :  Mr 
Lascelles  Abercrombie's  The  End  of  the  World.  Let  it 
be  granted  at  once  that  there  will  be  endless  discussions 
as  to  which  is  the  greater  of  the  two,  Mr  Bottomley's  or 
Mr  Abercrombie's  ;  for  the  moment  it  is  sufficient  to 
say  that  they  are  both  good  enough  to  make  us  glad 
to  live  in  an  age  both  great  and  courageous  enough  to 
produce  them. 

The  plot  of  The  End  of  the  World  is  quite  simple. 
The  scene  is  an  ale-house  kitchen  ;  a  stranger  comes  in 
full  of  news  to  the  assembled  drinkers,  news  which  they 


SOME  MODERN  POETS  77 

attempt  to  drag  from  him  by  various  means.  He  tries 
to  convey  to  them  his  state  of  mind  : 

I  wonder,  did  you  ever  hate  to  feel 
The  earth  so  splendid  and  so  fine  ? 

They  come  to  the  conclusion  that  he  is  mad  : 

Yes,  I  was  mad  and  crying  mad,  to  see 
The  earth  so  fine,  fine  all  for  nothing ; 

he  then  opens  the  door  and  shows  them  a  comet  in  the 
sky ;  he  says  that  that  means  the  end  of  the  world  ; 
they  are  about  to  be  burnt  up  : 

Time  shall  brush  the  fields  as  visibly 

As  a  rough  hand  brushes  against  the  nap 

Of  gleaming  cloth — killing  the  season's  colour  .   .  . 

And  sailors  panting  on  their  warping  decks 

Will  watch  the  sea  steam  like  broth  about  them. 

The  publican  wishes  he  had  his  old  wife  with  him  : 

This  would  have  suited  her. 
"  I  do  like  things  to  happen !  "  she  would  say, 
Never  shindy  enough  for  her ;  and  now 
She's  gone  and  can't  be  seeing  that. 

Each  man  takes  the  news  differently  and  calls  down  the 
derision  of  the  dowser  on  their  original  scepticism  : 

Ay,  you  begin  to  feel  it  now,  I  think ; 

But  Life, 
Life  with  her  skill  of  a  million  years'  perfection, 
Of  sunlight,  and  of  clouds  about  the  moon, 
Spring  lighting  her  daffodils  .  .  . 
And  mountains  sitting  in  their  purple  clothes  .  .  . 
O  life  I  am  thinking  of,  life  the  wonder, 
All  blotcht  out  by  a  brutal  thrust  of  fire 
Like  a  midge  that  a  clumsy  thumb  squashes  and  smears. 

Huff  the  farmer  seizes  the  occasion  to  gloat  over  the 
faithlessness  of  his  wife :     now  at  least   he  will   see 


78  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

vengeance.  The  man  with  whom  his  wife  ran  away 
comes  in  and  Huff  attempts  to  make  him  cower,  but 
to  no  purpose,  and  the  curtain  rings  down  on  Act  I., 
leaving  the  dowser  alone  bemoaning  the  intolerable 
waste  of  beauty  that  all  this  scorching  of  the  world  will 
bring  about. 

On  the  rise  of  the  curtain  for  the  second  and  last  Act 
we  see  Sollers,  the  wainwright,  wrecking  the  ale-house 
room  in  a  frenzy  of  apj^rehension  ;  the  publican  comes 
in  weeping,  "  I've  seen  the  moon ;  it  has  nigh  broke 
my  heart  ...  I  never  before  so  noted  her."  Beauty 
at  last  is  beginning  to  mean  something  to  him  now  that 
it  is  all  about  to  be  smashed  up  and  ruined.  Merrick, 
the  smith,  begins  to  achieve  a  philosophy ;  he  begins  to 
find  a  meaning  in  the  life  which  is  just  slipping  past  him : 

You  know,  this  is  much  more  than  being  happy. 
'Tis  hunger  of  some  power  in  you,  that  lives 
On  your  heart's  welcome  for  all  sorts  of  luck, 
But  always  looks  beyond  you  for  its  meaning. 
The  world  was  always  looking  to  use  its  life 
In  some  great  handsome  way  at  last.     And  now — 
We  are  just  fooled.   .  .   .   I've  had  my  turn. 
The  world  may  be  for  the  sake  of  naught  at  last, 
But  it  has  been  for  my  sake  :  I've  had  that. 

Huff  comes  in,  moody,  unable  to  find  comfort  in  the 
vengeance  he  thought  to  obtain  from  the  panic-stricken 
evil-doers ;  his  good,  straight  life  has  been  like  that  of  a 
crawling  caterpillar  ...  he  thinks  of  a  day  long  past 
in  Droitwich  where  he  saw  women  half-naked  cooking 
brine  ...  he  could  have  been  daring  once  but  missed 
his  chance.  Suddenly  Shale,  his  wife's  lover,  comes  in 
and  implores  Huff  to  take  his  wife  back  ;  Warp,  the 
molecatcher,  enters  during  the  scene  that  follows  and 
tells  them  that  there  is  nothing  to  fear ;  the  comet 
is  going  away  from  them ;  Huff's  ricks  are  alight, 
certainly,  but  there  is  to  be  no  end  of  the  world — yet. 


SOME  MODERN  POETS  79 

Mrs  Huff  turns  both  from  her  lover  and  her  husband  : 

They  thinking  J'ld  be  near  one  or  the  other 
After  this  night. 

We  are  left  with  Vine  moaning  : 

But  is  it  certain  there'll  be  nothing  smasht  ? 
Not  even  a  house  knockt  roaring  down  in  crumbles  ? 
— And  I  did  think,  I'ld  open  my  wife's  mouth 
With  envy  of  the  dreadful  things  I'd  seen! 

There  is  no  doubt  about  the  fascination  of  the  play  ;  it 
holds  the  reader's  attention  throughout ;  there  is  not 
a  false  note  from  beginning  to  end.  It  contains  all  the 
philosophy  of  the  younger  school ;  the  unending  search 
after  beauty,  the  refusal  to  shut  the  eyes  to  ugliness 
and  dirt,  the  endeavour  to  find  a  meaning  in  life,  the 
determination  to  live  life  to  the  full  and  to  enjoy.  At 
all  costs  they  strive  to  avoid  sentimentality  ;  these 
country  folk  in  The  End  of  the  World  really  live ;  they 
may  be  coarse ;  they  certainly  have  their  tragedies, 
but  they  are  human.  We  seem  to  know  them  through 
and  through  ;  we  certainly  sympathise  with  their  trials 
and  resent  their  wrongs  as  bitterly  as  we  do  our  own. 

This  noble  volume  is  intensely  typical  of  the  age  ; 
everything  is  tentative,  experimental ;  we  are  no  longer 
satisfied  with  the  old  gods,  the  old  ideals  ;  we  set  out 
to  prove  all  things  and  get  most  horribly  hurt  in  doing 
it ;  but  life  becomes  much  more  of  an  adventure ;  we 
are  at  least  brave  enough  to  cut  ourselves  adrift  from 
the  old,  safe,  enclosed  harbourage ;  we  make  many 
and  gross  mistakes,  but  we  do  achieve  something ;  we 
begin  to  learn  for  ourselves  what  life  really  means  and 
are  not  content  to  let  our  elders  tell  us  what  they  think 
it  ought  to  mean. 

It  means  beauty  to  start  with,  and  that  is  an  almost 


80  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

new  thought ;  at  any  rate  beauty  has  to  be  found  by 
each  individual  soul  at  the  cost  of  much  sorrow  of 
heart  and  much  unfortunate  experience  with  the  ugly  ; 
it  means  love,  which  is  not  so  easily  to  be  found  as  our 
forefathers  seem  to  have  thought ;  we  are  not  to  be  put 
off  with  shams  ...  it  means  courage,  and  courage  is 
not  to  be  cultivated  in  safety,  in  an  arm-chair ;  we  have 
to  cut  adrift,  away  from  convention  and  laws  made  for 
a  milk-livered  generation.  Georgian  Poetry  1913-1914 
is  a  brave  book ;  it  is  the  standard  of  revolt  of  the 
younger,  braver  souls  among  us,  and  we  who  are  apt  at 
times  to  acquiesce  because  it  is  easier  owe  much  to  a 
book  which  strengthens  and  fortifies  our  resolution  just 
when  we  show  signs  of  wavering.  Our  poets  are  our 
real  national  leaders  ;  they  alone  can  express  all  those 
desires  which  we  feel  but  are  unable  to  articulate ;  if 
our  poets  are  false  to  us,  then  indeed  are  we  decadent. 
From  1913  to  1915  at  any  rate  we  may  be  thankful 
that  they  have  led  us  fearlessly,  put  fresh  vitality  and 
renewed  energy  into  our  hopes  and  helped  us  once 
more  to  try  to  wrest  life's  secret  from  her. 


IV 
SOME   .MORE   MODERN   POETS 

IT  is  commonly  said  that  the  only  true  critics  of 
poetry  are  the  masters  in  the  same  craft,  and  if 
the  case  of  Swinburne  may  be  taken  as  typical, 
I  agree.  We  think  of  Francis  Thompson's  superb 
tribute  to  Shelley  and  Masefield's  contribution  to  our 
completer  understanding  of  Shakespeare,  and  shudder 
at  the  thought  of  a  mere  prose-writer  daring  to  pene- 
trate the  sanctuary  and  lay  his  rude  hands  on  the 
beauty  he  can  never  hope  to  explain.  Suddenly  we 
think  of  Hazlitt  and  take  comfort.  To  what  critic  do 
we  turn  so  often,  and  why  ? 

Because  he  acts  as  half-way  house  in  the  ascent  of 
Parnassus ;  he  is  the  intermediary  between  the  gods 
and  ourselves,  because  he  does  what  the  poets  them- 
selves never  find  time  to  do,  and  that  is  to  translate  for 
us  exactly  what  they  are  at  as  he  understands  it.  The 
poets  are  so  busy  doing  things  that  they  never  stop 
to  explain  and  we  are  left  labouring  far  in  the  rear, 
panting,  dispirited  .  .  .  and  sometimes  even  sym- 
pathise with  our  intellectually  moribund,  materially 
minded  acquaintances  or  relatives  who  start  at  the 
word  "  poetry  "  as  if  they  had  been  shot,  and  exclaim  : 
"  What's  the  use  of  it  anyway  ?  What  useful  purpose 
does  it  serve  ?  "  as  if  they  expected  it  to  be  a  dynamo 
in  the  physical  as  well  as  the  spiritual  world. 

Those  of  us  who  have  no  poetry  in  our  composition 

and  yet  delight  in  it  as  the  cleanser  and  purifier  of  life, 

who  regard  poets  as  the  unacknowledged  legislators  of 

the  world,  in  some  way  are  perhaps  best  fitted  to 

f  81 


82  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

bring  a  realisation  of  it  home  to  the  businesses  and 
bosoms  of  men  ;  we  pay  less  heed  to  the  technique  (in 
so  doing,  of  course,  we  miss  some  of  the  beauties)  and 
more  to  the  matter.  For  it  seems  to  me  of  the  first 
importance  that  a  poet  should  have  something  to  say. 
I  don't  exactly  mean  a  message  to  bear,  but  a  song 
that  will  ease  the  heart,  cause  aesthetic  delight,  help  us 
to  face  life  with  a  cheerier  spirit,  fuller  of  determination 
not  only  to  see  it  through,  but  to  make  the  most  of  it. 

Poetry  makes  the  deaf  to  hear,  the  blind  to  see,  the 
maimed  and  halt  to  walk  ...  if  it  doesn't  do  this,  it 
isn't  poetry.  Hence  it  follows  that  sincerity  and 
nobility  of  purpose  are  as  essential  to  our  poet  as 
sweetness  and  music  ;  in  fact,  these  follow  from  it,  for 
there  is  no  sweetness  where  there  is  no  light  and  no 
music  where  there  is  no  motive.  Facile  versifiers 
abound  ;  I  am  one  of  them  ;  you  pick  up  their  stuff  in 
all  the  daily  and  weekly  papers  ;  they  are  not  to  be 
despised  any  more  than  an  undergraduate  is  to  be 
despised  for  dishing  up  second-hand  opinions  to  his 
tutor  and  calling  it  an  essay  ;  it  is  popularly  known  as 
an  education.  It  may  be  ;  you  and  I  are  not  professors, 
we  are  not  paid  to  read  or  give  academic  exercises — we 
needn't  waste  our  time  over  what  appears  in  ephemeral 
journals. 

What  is  much  more  extraordinary  is  that  good  poets 
abound.  There  has  never  been  an  age  so  rich  in  poets 
in  history  as  our  own,  not  even  the  wonderful  days 
exactly  a  hundred  years  ago. 

We  live  in  a  time  of  amazing  literary  geniuses  of 
every  sort ;  the  whole  of  England  suddenly  seems  to 
have  become  articulate,  and  in  order  to  express  itself 
it  has  chosen  the  vehicle  of  poetry  for  the  most  part. 

In  times  of  intense  emotional  crises,  face  to  face  with 
the  eternal  realities  of  birth  and  love  and  death,  man 


SOME  MORE  MODERN  POETS  83 

will  sing  ;  he  cannot  help  it.  Consequently  we  seem 
to  be  at  present  a  nation  of  soldier-poets  and  poet- 
soldiers.  All  I  can  do  is  to  make  a  haphazard  selection 
and  try  to  show  how  the  mosaic  fits,  how  far  they 
cohere  and  where  they  cut  themselves  adrift  from  the 
tendencies  of  their  time. 

It  is  a  mistake  to  suppose  that  we  owe  this  sudden 
renaissance  in  poetry  solely  to  the  war,  for  much  of  the 
work  now  appearing  was  written  before  or  regardless  of  it. 

Flecker,  for  instance,  was  doomed  before  ever  its 
shadow  came.  In  some  degree  he  is  the  most  modern 
of  them  all,  for  he  returned  to  that  tradition  which 
the  Georgians  set  themselves  against.  He  reacted 
consciously  against  that  reaction  from  the  tradition  of 
material  beauty,  which  is  so  marked  a  feature  of  all  the 
twentieth-century  poets.  He  rebelled  against  the  idea 
that  there  should  be  any  message  in  poetry,  and  set  out, 
sharpening  his  tools  at  the  best  forge,  that  of  continu- 
ous energy,  with  the  sole  idea  of  creating  beauty.  "  It 
is  not,"  he  says,  "the  poet's  business  to  save  man's  soul, 
but  to  make  it  worth  saving."  Consequently  in  all  his 
mature  work  we  get  a  riot  of  colour  and  sensuous  beauty, 
names  and  men  and  relics  made  romantic  and  bizarre. 

When  he  was  in  England  he  longed  for  the  East,  but 
when  he  attained  his  wish  he  wished  to  be  in  England 
once  again.  Like  all  of  us,  he  was  happiest  in  the 
place  where  he  was  not. 

Unlike  most  poets  he  did  not  try  to  transform  the 
common  into  the  miraculous,  but  rather  pressed  on  at 
once  into  the  virgin  region  of  fantasy,  and  so  we  get  the 
exquisite  Golden  Journey  to  Samarkand,  on  which,  in 
the  mind  of  the  general  reader,  Flecker's  fame  will  rest. 
Has  ever  poet  hit  upon  a  more  haunting  melody  than 
that  of  Yasmin  and  The  Gates  of  Damascus  ? 

But  it  must  not  be  imagined  that  because  he  dwelt 


84  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

so  persistently  on  beauty  that  he  has  left  us  no  idea 
of  his  own  theory  of  the  riddle  of  the  universe.  "  We 
poets  crave  no  heaven  but  what  is  ours,"  he  says, 
and  his  heaven  is  this  familiar  world  refashioned 
without  man's  and  Nature's  pain  .  .  . 

Grant  me  earth's  treats  in  Paradise  to  find 

Nor  listen  to  that  island-bound  St  John, 

Who'd  have  no  Sea  in  Heaven,  no  Sea  to  sail  upon ! 

thereby  linking  himself  up  with  both  Kipling  and 
Brooke. 

So  insistent  is  his  love  for  the  sea  and  the  beauty  of 
ships  that  I  doubt  whether  I  could  find  any  poem  more 
typical  of  Flecker's  work  than  The  Old  Ships.  We 
have  in  it  that  delicious  honey  of  Hymettus,  admixture 
of  colour  and  sensuous  beauty  that  have  made  his  name 
famous  to-day  and  will  cause  a  place  to  be  reserved  for 
him  eternally  in  the  Temple  of  Parnassus. 

THE  OLD  SHIPS 
I  have  seen  old  ships  sail  like  swans  asleep 
Beyond  the  village  which  men  still  call  Tyre, 
With  leaden  age  o'ercargoed,  dipping  deep 
For  Famagusta  and  the  hidden  sun 
That  rings  black  Cyprus  with  a  lake  of  fire ; 
And  all  those  ships  were  certainly  so  old — 
Who  knows  how  oft  with  squat  and  noisy  gun, 
Questing  brown  slaves  or  Syrian  oranges, 
The  pirate  Genoese 
Hell-raked  them  till  they  rolled 
Blood,  water,  fruit  and  corpses  up  the  hold. 
But  now  through  friendly  seas  they  softly  run, 
Painted  the  mid-sea  blue  or  shore-sea  green, 
Still  patterned  with  the  vines  and  grapes  in  gold. 
But  I  have  seen 

Pointing  her  shapely  shadows  from  the  lawn 
And  image  tumbled  on  a  rose-swept  bay 
A  drowsy  ship  of  some  yet  older  day ; 
And,  wonder's  breath  indrawn, 


SOME  MORE  MODERN  POETS  85 

Thought  I — who  knows — who  knows — but  in  that  same 

(Fished  up  beyond  Aeaea,  patched  up  new 

— Stern  painted  brighter  blue — ) 

That  talkative,  bald-headed  seaman  came 

(Twelve  patient  comrades  sweating  at  the  oar) 

From  Troy's  doom-crimson  shore, 

And  with  great  lies  about  his  wooden  horse 

Set  the  crew  laughing,  and  forgot  his  course. 

It  was  so  old  a  ship — who  knows,  who  knows  ? 

— And  yet  so  beautiful,  I  watched  in  vain 

To  see  the  mast  burst  open  with  a  rose, 

And  the  whole  deck  put  on  its  leaves  again. 

This  and  Brimana  seem  to  me  to  mark  the  high- 
water  mark  of  Flecker' s  genius. 

I  now  want,  for  a  little,  to  leave  the  well-known  men 
and  talk  almost  at  random  about  one  or  two  of  the 
myriad  men  who  are  writing  poetry  in  partial  obscurity, 
to  see  how  far  they  carry  on  the  tradition  of  their 
masters.  There  was  recently  published  a  slim  volume 
called  Fragments,  by  a  subaltern  in  the  Welsh  Guards, 
Evan  Morgan,  out  of  which  I  cull  one  sonnet. 

LABURNUM 

Lo !  from  thy  verdant  arms  drooping  and  pensile, 

Molten  gold  falls  in  summer-scented  cones  ; 

Clinging  with  quivering  tongue,  thirsty,  prehensile, 

Into  thy  lips  thy  velvet  lover  drones. 

Subtle  thy  raiment,  shading  thy  umber  arms, 

Falls  like  to  sun-bars,  or  maiden's  aureole  tresses ; 

Piercing  thy  emerald  cloak,  naked  thy  charms, 

Lie  for  passion'd  June's  untuned  caresses. 

One  early  rose-kissed  cloud  of  morning's  love 

Saw  through  thy  tapestries  a  naked  nymph 

Amidst  thy  sinuous  arms  more  sinuous  move 

And  slip  into  the  lily-painted  lymph. 

Her  God-like  lover  with  a  silvery  net 

Drew  back  his  prize  all  glistening  and  all  wet. 

There  is  much  in  this  sonnet  which  will  cause  grave 
searchings  of  heart  among  the  older  school  of  £>oets,  but 


86  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

it  has  freshness,  it  is  original  if  slightly  bizarre  in  tone 
and  rather  too  intellectual.  The  influence  of  Rupert 
Brooke  is  immediately  manifest.  He  is  an  obvious 
disciple  both  of  Flecker  and  Brooke,  though  he  neces- 
sarily lags  far  behind.  Like  so  many  of  these  young 
poets,  he  is  careless  about  rhyme  schemes ;  he  rhymes 
"  ore  "  with  "floor,"  ;<  amber  "  with  " unbar  "  and  even 
"castle"  with  <•  battle."  His  publisher  even  allows 
such  ridiculous  solecisms  as 

"The  clouds  are  shook  out  in  their  play." 

"  Thou  shouldst  lift  up  your  hands,  dear,  and  nestle  me  over 
your  heart." 

But  these  are  merely  the  foibles  of  youth,  which  is  ever 
indolent  and  averse  from  taking  those  pains  which  are 
so  essential  to  every  artist. 

We  forgive  all  the  touches  of  ccenobitic  loons  and 
ocelliferous  leaves  (even  Cowper  never  descended  so  low 
as  that !)  when  we  come  across  the  perfect  simplicity 
of  Song  in  Valediction  and  the  sensuous  loveliness  of 
Laburnum.  He  plays  with  realism  in  an  odious  sonnet 
to  a  drift  of  seaweed,  and  dwells  too  frequently  on 
anatomical  perfection ;  it  is  all  very  young,  but  certainly 
worth  doing  ...  as  he  says,  and  he  is  his  own  best 
critic,  "Here  is  Love,  Joy,  Sorrow,  Reflection,  a 
cosmopolitan  piece,  ill-shapen,  sincere."  The  ill-shape 
may  be  grown  out  of;  sincerity  is  too  rare  and  too 
valuable  to  be  sneered  at.  We  welcome  him  among 
the  Georgians.  It  is  this  cosmopolitan  trait  that  is  so 
healthy  a  sign  of  our  times.  My  next  example  is 
Egbert  T.  Sandford,  at  the  opposite  end  of  the  social 
scale. 

His  influences  are  William  Blake  and  Francis  Thomp- 
son, as  will  be  seen  at  once  in  Great  in  their  Littleness. 
His  one  object  is  to  take  the  common  things  of  life  and 


SOME  MORE  MODERN  POETS  87 

weave  them  into  song.  He  is  the  apostle  of  light  and 
happiness.  "  Life  looms  with  laughter  :  God  fills  our 
world  with  gladness  to  the  brim,"  he  sings  again  and 
again,  trilling  like  a  lark  for  the  pleasure  that  is  in  him. 
After  treading  the  fire-strewn  floors  of  hell  he  emerges 
strengthened,  joyful  and  endowed  with  the  gift  of  pure 
lyrical  song,  and,  like  all  true  poets,  has  something  to 
say  which  strikes  an  entirely  new  chord.  I  seem  to 
remember  a  text  in  the  Bible  which  runs  somehow 
like  this :  "  Blessed  are  the  barren ;  for  they  shall  bear 
children" — the  kind  of  paradoxical  phrase  I  could  not 
understand.  To  Mr  Sandford  as  to  Blake  such  things 
are  pellucidly  clear,  and  in  The  Voice  he  translates  so 
that  we  purblind  people  can  realise  the  glory  and  the 
truth  of  that  prophecy.  His  is  the  gospel  of  song,  and 
strife  and  love  and  life. 

GREAT  IN  THEIR  LITTLENESS 

The  faintest  star  in  darkest  night 
Adds  light  unto  the  realms  of  light. 

The  smallest  wave  that  breasts  the  sea 
Helps  with  the  ocean's  melody. 

The  frailest  flower  that  decks  earth's  sod 
Lends  lustre  to  the  feet  of  God. 

THE   VOICE 

Deep  from  a  day,  as  sunless  as  'twas  lone, 

There  came  a  voice, 

Saying  to  her  :  "  Rejoice  ! 

Not  every  child  is  formed  of  flesh  and  bone. 

"  So,  when  his  eyes  are  bruised  and  stained  with  tears, 
Do  thou  bring  forth  sweet  Laughter.     When  wild  fears 
Assail  his  soul,  then  let  thy  little  one 
Be  Joy ;  and  bid  thy  children  run— 


88  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

Run  straight  to  him. — Ah  !  Dost  thou  know — 

Thine  offspring  shall  wax  strong 

And  thou,  thyself,  shalt  go 

From  strength  to  strength,  with  them.     E'en  though 

Thou  couldst  not  be  the  mother  of  his  son, 

Thou  still  mayst  be  the  Mother  of  his  Song." 

"  Live  !  Live  !  Live  !  "  he  writes.  "  They  only 
die  who  never  try  to  live." 

How  exactly  he  echoes  the  thoughts  of  every  woman 
in  the  land  in  Her  Prayer — For  Him. 

HER  PRAYER— FOR  HIM 

I  do  not  ask  that  he  may  never  yield 

When  fighting  on  the  foam  or  on  the  field, 

Since  this  I  know  : — 

Where'er  his  country  calls  my  man  will  go. 

I  only  pray 

That  while  he  is  away 

You  guard  and  guide  him  day  by  day ! 

And  give  me  strength  to  tend  his  little  ones 

Until  he  comes. 

On  land  or  sea, — 

WTherever  he  may  be, 

God,  kiss  my  man  for  me  ! 

In  the  last  two  poems  which  I  have  time  to  quote  of 
his,  as  in  the  one  I  have  just  quoted,  we  find  the  same 
universality  :  in  each  he  crystallises  a  point  of  view 
that  all  of  us  have  kept  in  the  secret  recesses  of  our 
hearts  and  not  been  able,  for  want  of  adequate  expres- 
sion, to  give  voice  to. 

IF  I  SHOULD   DIE 

If  I  should  die 

Before  you,  dear, 

God  knows  that  I 

Would  be  so  lonely  in  that  other  Land ; 

Yet,  I  am  sure  that  He  would  understand, 


SOME  MORE  MODERN  POETS  89 

And  have  permission  given 

That  I  might  wander  in  and  out  of  Heaven 

To  meet  you,  here. 

Love,  shall  I  tell  you  where  to  look  for  me 

In  that  dim  day  ? — 

Not  in  the  silent  grave-yard  way, 

Through  which  grim  ghosts  of  sorrow  stray, 

I  shall  not  tarry  there — 

Come  to  a  sunlit  bush  or  tree, 

To  wind-swept  moor,  to  storm-lashed  sea ; 

By  brook,  or  bank,  or  flower,  or  star, 

And,  where  the  stained-with-struggle  are — 

Look  for  me  there  !  look  for  me  there ! 


IN  WAR 

She  spread  the  cloth  for  two 
And  placed  his  chair. 
Then  cried  :  "  How  silly  ! 
Why,  I  thought  that  he  was  here." 

At  length  there  came  a  letter, 

Saying :  "  Dear, 

Did  you  find  me  yesterday  ?  .   .  . 

.  .   .   How  I  did  pray 

That  I  might  meet  you 

In  our  wee  home-way."   .   .  . 

Ah,  then  she  knew 

Why  she  had  placed  his  chair, 

And  plate,  and  cup  and  saucer  .   .   . 

He  was  there. 

Mr  Theodore  Maynard,  my  next  choice,  may  be 
known  to  you.  I  certainly  hope  so,  for  if  not  you  have 
missed  a  great  poet.  His  slim  volume,  called  Laughs 
and  Whifts  of  Songs,  is  a  sheer  delight.  He  is  one 
of  those  starveling  poets  and  enthusiasts  who  have 
shirked  no  battle  for  the  stricken  earth  against  its 
tyrants'  spears  and  arbalests  with  courage  and  with 
mirth.     Yes— that  is  the  word— mirth.     He  has  some- 


90  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

thing  of  the  large,  fat,  good-humoured  touches  of  Gilbert 
Chesterton,  whose  disciple  he  obviously  is  ;  a  mystic, 
like  Sandford,  yet  he  is  poles  removed  from  him  in  his 
sense  of  colour,  which  pervades  every  poem.  He  is 
simple,  sincere,  direct,  whimsical  and  withal  humorous. 
He  is  the  poet  of  that  serene  cheerfulness  which  is  the 
peculiar  gift  of  the  happy  warrior.  We  see  that  at  once 
in  When  I  Ride  into  the  Town.  The  English  Spring  is  just 
typical  of  the  age  in  which  we  live,  now  that  we  have 
grown  to  recognise  at  last  how  lovely  is  our  own  land. 
In  Apocalypse  we  get  that  same  hankering  after  material 
beauty  hereafter  which  Brooke  so  exquisitely  described 
in  Tiare  Tahiti.  To  a  Good  Atheist  and  To  a  Bad  Atheist 
show  us  the  distance  we  have  travelled  in  overcoming 
our  ancient  prejudices  and  at  last  arrived  at  a  sane 
judgment. 

APOCALYPSE 

Shall  summer  wood  where  we  have  laughed  our  fill ; 

Shall  all  your  grass  so  good  to  walk  upon  ; 
Each  field  which  we  have  loved,  each  little  hill, 

Be  burnt  like  paper — as  hath  said  Saint  John  ? 
Then  not  alone  they  die  !     For  God  hath  told 

How  all  His  plains  of  mingled  fire  and  glass, 
His  walls  of  hyacinth,  His  streets  of  gold, 

His  aureoles  of  jewelled  light  shall  pass, 
That  he  may  make  us  nobler  things  than  these, 

And  in  his  royal  robes  of  blazing  red 
Adorn  his  bride.     Yea,  with  what  mysteries 

And  might  and  mirth  shall  she  be  diamonded  ! 
And  what  new  secrets  shall  our  God  disclose  ; 

Or  set  what  suns  of  burnished  brass  to  flare  ; 
Or  what  empurpled  blooms  to  oust  the  rose  ; 

Or  what  strange  grass  to  glow  like  angels'  hair  ! 
What  pinnacles  of  silver  tracery, 

What  dizzy,  vampired  towers  shall  God  devise 
Of  topaz,  beryl  and  chalcedony 

To  make  Heaven  pleasant  to  His  children's  eyes ! 


SOME  MORE  MODERN  POETS  91 

And  in  what  cataclysms  of  flame  and  foam 
Shall  the  first  Heaven  sink — as  red  as  sin — 

When  God  hath  cast  aside  His  ancient  home 
As  far  too  mean  to  house  His  children  in  ! 

TO  A  GOOD  ATHEIST 

That  you  can  keep  your  crested  courage  high, 

And  hopeless  hope  without  a  cause,  and  wage 
Christ's  warfare,  lacking  all  the  panoply 

Of  Faith  which  shall  endure  the  end  of  age, 
You  must  be  made  of  finely  tempered  stuff, 

And  have  a  kinship  with  that  Spanish  saint, 
Who  wrote  of  his  soul's  night — it  wras  enough 

That  he  should  drag  his  footsteps  tired  and  faint 
Along  his  God-appointed  pathway.     You 

Have  stood  against  our  day  of  bitter  scorn, 
When  loudly  its  triumphant  trumpets  blew 

Contempt  of  all  God's  poor.     Had  you  been  born 
But  in  the  time  of  Jeanne  or  Catherine, 

Whose  charity  was  as  a  sword  of  flame, 
WTith  those  who  drank  up  martyrdom  like  wine 

Had  stood  your  aureoled  and  ringing  name. 
Yet,  when  that  secret  day  of  God  shall  break 

With  strange  and  splendid  justice  through  the  skies, 
When  first  are  last,  then  star-ward  you  shall  take 

The  praise  and  sorrow  of  your  starry  eyes. 

TO  A  BAD  ATHEIST 

You  do  not  love  the  shadows  on  the  wall, 
Or  mists  that  flee  before  a  blowing  wind, 
Or  Gothic  forests,  or  light  aspen  leaves, 
Or  skies  that  melt  into  a  dreamy  sea. 
In  the  hot,  glaring  noontide  of  your  mind 
(I  have  your  word  for  it)  there  is  no  room 
For  anything  save  sawdust,  sun  and  sand. 

No  monkish  flourishes  will  do  for  you  ; 

Your  life  must  be  set  down  in  black  and  white. 

The  quiet  half-light  of  the  abbey  close, 

The  cunning  carving  of  a  chantry  tomb, 

The  leaden  windows  pricked  with  golden  saints — 

All  these  are  nothing  to  your  rag-time  soul  ! 


92  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

Yet,  since  you  are  a  solemn  little  chap, 
In  spite  of  all  your  blasphemy  and  booze, 
That  dreadful  sword  of  satire  which  you  shake 
Hurts  no  hide  but  your  own, — you  cannot  use 
A  weapon  which  is  bigger  than  yourself. 

Yet  some  there  were  who  rode  all  clad  in  mail, — 

With  crosses  blazoned  on  their  mighty  shields, 

Roland  who  blew  his  horn  against  the  Moor, 

Richard  who  charged  for  Christ  at  Ascalon, 

Louis  a  pilgrim  with  his  chivalry, 

And  blessed  Jeanne  who  saved  the  crown  of  France — 

Pah  !      You  may  keep  your  whining  Super-man. 

The  Mystic  and  Free-Will  carry  on  the  same  broad 
sympathies  and  acute  perception,  and  we  take  leave  of 
a  real  live  poet  in  Requiem,  which  for  sheer  beauty  is 
worth  its  place  in  any  anthology. 


REQUIEM 

When  my  last  song  is  sung  and  I  am  dead 

And  laid  away  beneath  the  kindly  clay, 
Set  a  square  stone  above  my  dreamless  head, 

And  sign  me  with  the  cross  and  signing  say  : 
u  Here  lieth  one  who  loved  the  steadfast  things 

Of  his  own  land,  its  gladness  and  its  grace, 
The  stubbled  fields,  the  linnets'  gleaming  wings, 

The  long,  low  gables  of  his  native  place, 
Its  gravelled  paths,  and  the  strong  wind  that  sends 

The  boughs  about  the  house,  the  hearth's  red  glow, 
The  surly,  slow  good-fellowship  of  friends, 

The  humour  of  the  men  he  used  to  know, 
And  all  their  swinging  choruses  and  mirth  " — 

Then  turn  aside  and  leave  my  dust  in  earth. 

Miss  Eva  Gore-Booth  has  already  earned  for  herself 
a  name  not  lightly  to  be  forgotten  in  The  Little  Waves  of 
Breffny,  which  is  closely  related  to  The  Lake  Isle  of 
Innisfree.     She  sings  of  the  East,  of  mysticism,  but 


SOME  MORE  MODERN  POETS  93 

most  of  all  of  the  sun  and  the  wind  and  the  April  rain, 
and  the  wild  seas'  shining  plain,  the  ancient  joy  in  the 
world's  young  eyes,  the  blue  hills'  dim  eternal  range. 


THE  LITTLE  WAVES  OF  BREFFNY 

The  grand  road  from  the  mountain  goes  shining  to  the  sea, 
And  there  is  traffic  in  it,  and  many  a  horse  and  cart ; 

But  the  little  roads  of  Cloonagh  are  dearer  far  to  me, 

And  the  little  roads  of  Cloonagh  go  rambling  through  my 
heart. 

A  great  storm  from  the  ocean  goes  shouting  o'er  the  hill. 

And  there  is  glory  in  it  and  terror  on  the  wind  ; 
But  the  haunted  air  of  twilight  is  very  strange  and  still, 

And  the  little  winds  of  twilight  are  dearer  to  my  mind. 

The  great  waves  of  the  Atlantic  sweep  storming  on  their  way, 

Shining  green  and  silver  with  the  hidden  herring  shoal ; 
But  the  little  waves  of  Breffny  have  drenched  my  heart  in 
spray, 
And  the  little  waves  of  Breffny  go  stumbling  through  my 
soul. 

Mr  Cecil  Roberts,  the  marvellous  boy,  has  been 
in  turn  auctioneer's  clerk,  schoolmaster,  journalist, 
starved  on  the  Embankment,  stood  for  Parliament  .  .  . 
fighting  for  recognition  as  a  poet  through  it  all,  with 
the  result  that  at  twenty-three  he  has  earned  from 
the  big  critics  the  title  of  our  twentieth-century 
Keats. 

Unfortunately  it  is  impossible  to  give  you  his  best 
poems— Andromache,  A  Child's  Eyes  and  The  Yovth  of 
Beauty — so  I  must  wrench  one  stanza  from  its  context, 
and  hope  that  you  will  grasp  from  that  something 
of  the  blend  of  Keats  and  Francis  Thompson  that 
makes  him  so  dear  to  the  hearts  of  all  lovers  of 
beautv. 


94  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 


A  CHILD'S  EYES 

Once  upon  a  time, 

That  sad,  all-suffering  time, 

When  presaging  song  had  filled  my  heart  with  woe, 

I  chanced  to  go, 
A  forlorn  songster,  smutted  with  the  grime 
Of  the  most  heartless  City  of  the  World, 
Sickened  with  undeserving  long  neglect, 
Into  a  place  where  spread 
On  lettered  shelves  the  great,  undying  dead, 
Whose  singing  souls,  in  pilgrimage  elect, 
Still  wing  them  down  the  ringing  ways  of  Time, 
With  Fame's  immortal  banner  o'er  them  furled  : 
And  taking  down  a  vellum-covered  book, 

I  sought  a  nook 
Wherein  to  scent  the  fragrance  of  its  rhyme  : 
Ah,  then  how  shall  I  tell  this  thing  so  great, 
What  song,  what  lyric  rapture  magical 
Can  fitly  tell  an  act  grown  tragical 
With  cherished  fondness  in  my  foolish  heart  ? — 
This  little  act  beyond  all  estimate, 
For  'twas  at  lowest  ebb  of  Fortune's  flood 
A  child  intuitively  understood, 
A  little  child  that  in  most  tragic-wise 
Looked  with  her  big  wide  eyes, 
Then  spake,  and  changed  my  Hell  to  singing  Paradise! 

The  whole  idea  of  modern  life  is  to  open  the  heart, 
broaden  the  sympathies,  make  people  realise  how 
beautiful  the  world  is,  how  unnecessarily  brutal  we 
have  allowed  part  of  it  to  become. 

You  would  not  expect  me  to  introduce  a  Guardsman 
to  you  with  such  a  remark,  but  Captain  Colwyn 
Philipps,  devotee  of  Rudyard  Kipling  as  he  was,  has  in 
his  best  work  so  simple  and  sincere  a  feeling  that  he 
achieves  almost  unconsciously  the  poetic  in  his  pity 
and  love  for  all  humanity.  There  is  no  need  for  me  to 
quote  extracts  from  his  work,  for,  like  his  fellow-captain, 
Charles  Sorley,  he  is  very  widely  read.     These  two, 


SOME  MORE  MODERN  POETS  95 

whom  Ave  could  ill  spare  as  poets  and  still  less  as  men, 
have  both  been  killed,  and  England  is  the  poorer— all 
the  best  men  go— as  if  God  were  jealous  of  our  too  good 
fortune  in  having  them. 

I  turn  now  from  individual  works  to  anthologies,  and 
first  I  would  very  shortly  commend  to  your  notice  The 
Country  Life  Anthology  of  Verse,  which  maintains  a 
level  of  excellence  which  I  can  best  typify  by  selecting 
just  two  poems,  Separation  and  Parliament  Hill.  Even 
the  ephemeral  weekly  papers  you  see  contain  poetry  of 
a  kind  that  is  certainly  far  removed  from  mere  verse. 

SEPARATION 

Though  you  have  passed  so  very  far  away 

Your  life  is  mine,  as  mine  is  yours,  to-day. 

Time,  space,  are  powerless  and  not  as  bars 

Our  groping  thoughts  to  sever. 

Dawns,  faint  and  fair,  and  sunsets  flaming  wide 

Still  bring  you  to  my  side ; 

And  all  high  hopes  that  throb  beneath  the  stars 

Are  yours  and  mine  for  ever. 

But  ah  !  the  little  things  for  which  I  sigh, 

As  each  day  passes  by  : 

The  open  book,  the  flower  upon  the  floor, 

The  dainty  disarray, 

The  sound  of  passing  feet, 

The  distant  door — 

Alas,  the  little  things  of  every  day  ! 

The  silent  eve,  my  sweet, 

The  lonely  waking — 

Alas,  alas  !  for  little  things  my  heart  is  breaking. 

Isabel  Butchart. 

PARLIAMENT  HILL 
Have   you    seen    the  lights   of   London,  how  they  twinkle, 
twinkle,  twinkle, 
Yellow  lights,  and   silver  lights,  and   crimson   lights,   and 
blue? 


96  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

And  there  among  the  other  lights  is  Daddy's  little  lantern- 
light, 

Bending  like  a  finger-tip  and  beckoning  to  you. 

Never  was  so  tall  a  hill  for  tiny  feet  to  scramble  up. 
Never  was  so  strange  a  world  to  baffle  little  eyes, 

Half  of  it  as  black  as  ink,  with  ghostly  feet  to  fall  on  it, 
And    half  of  it   all    crammed  with   lamps,    and    cheerful 
sounds  and  cries. 

Lamps  in   golden   palaces,  and  station-lamps,  and   steamer- 
lamps, 
Very  nearly  all  the  lamps  that  Mother  ever  knew, 
And  there  among  the  other  lamps  is  Daddy's  little  lantern- 
lamp, 
Bending  like  a  finger-tip  and  beckoning  to  you. 

H.  H.  Bashford. 


R.  L.  Stevenson  never  excelled  the  fragile  tenderness, 
the  exquisite  whimsicality  of  this,  even  in  The  Lamp- 
lighter. 

A  far  more  important  volume  is  Sidgwick  &  Jackson's 
brave  venture,  Poems  of  To-day,  an  anthology  for 
schools.  I  can  scarcely  believe  that  there  is  any 
cultured  person  who  does  not  possess  a  copy  ;  its 
significance  is  overwhelming.  First  of  all  it  means  that 
we  do  realise  our  own  greatness,  we  are  in  no  doubt  as  to 
what  is  poetry,  and  we  recognise  the  difference  that  it 
makes  to  the  lives  of  the  young,  who  are  of  all  people 
the  most  easily  influenced  by  imaginative  work. 

The  selection  has  been  made  with  infinite  care,  and 
includes  nothing  that  does  not  stand  the  test  which  we 
apply  to  real  poetry  ;  each  poem  contains  a  theme, 
musically,  perfectly  expressed,  a  thought  that  could 
not  have  been  translated  into  words  in  any  other 
way. 

It  tells  of  the  beauty  of  the  country-side,  of  love  of 
women,  of  high  and  noble  actions,  of  all  that  goes  home 


SOME  MORE  MODERN  POETS  97 

to  the  hearts  of  men.  My  quotations  must  necessarily 
be  short.  I  cannot  conceive  that  I  am  here  giving 
you  anything  that  you  do  not  already  know  better 
than  I  do,  but  it  would  be  hopelessly  inadequate 
to  treat  of  modern  poetry  without  reference  to  this 
volume. 

The  selections  are  divided  into  three  groups  :  of 
History,  of  the  Earth,  "  of  England  again  and  the  long- 
ing of  the  exile  for  home,  of  this  and  that  familiar 
country-side,  of  woodland  and  meadow  and  garden,  of 
the  process  of  the  season,  of  the  open  road  and  the  wind 
on  the  heath,  of  the  city,  its  deprivations  and  its  con- 
solations," and  finally  of  life  itself,  "  of  the  moods  in 
which  it  may  be  faced,  of  religion,  of  man's  excellent 
virtues,  of  friendship  and  childhood,  of  passion,  grief, 
and  comfort.  All  these  poems  mingle  and  interpene- 
trate throughout,  to  the  music  of  Pan's  flute,  and  of 
love's  viol,  and  the  bugle-call  of  Endeavour,  and  the 
passing-bell  of  Death." 

Almost  every  modern  poet  of  genius  is  repre- 
sented, from  Stevenson,  Meredith,  Bridges,  A.  E., 
Yeats,  Alice  Meynell  and  Francis  Thompson,  to 
Gerald  Gould,  Chesterton,  Lionel  Johnson  and  John 
Davidson. 

It  is  the  one  great  proof,  if  one  were  needed, 
to  show  that  this  age  need  fear  comparison  with  no 
other  in  the  whole  range  of  English  literature.  A  bold 
assertion,  you  say.  Well,  here  is  one  extract,  chosen 
almost  at  random,  from  one  of  the  lesser-known  poets. 
What  poet  of  what  other  age  could  have  excelled  this 
in  its  own  line  ? 

As  I  went  down  to  Dymchurch  wall, 
I  heard  the  South  sing  o'er  the  land ; 

I  saw  the  yellow  sunlight  fall 

On  knolls  where  Norman  churches  stand. 


98  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

And  ringing  shrilly,  taut  and  lithe, 

Within  the  wind  a  core  of  sound, 
The  wire  from  Romney  town  to  Hythe 

Alone  its  airy  journey  wound. 

A  veil  of  purple  vapour  flowed 

And  trailed  its  fringe  along  the  Straits ; 

The  upper  air  like  sapphire  glowred ; 
And  roses  filled  Heaven's  central  gates. 

Masts  in  the  offing  wagged  their  tops ; 

The  swinging  waves  pealed  on  the  shore  ; 
The  saffron  beach,  all  diamond  drops 

And  beads  of  surge,  prolonged  the  roar. 

As  I  came  up  from  Dymchurch  wall, 

I  saw  above  the  Down's  low  crest 
The  crimson  brands  of  sunset  fall, 

Flicker  and  fade  from  out  the  West. 

Night  sank  :  like  flakes  of  silver  fire 

The  stars  in  one  great  shower  came  down ; 

Shrill  blew  the  wind ;  and  shrill  the  wire 
Rang  out  from  Hythe  to  Romney  town. 

The  darkly  shining  salt  sea  drops 

Streamed  as  the  waves  clashed  on  the  shore, 

The  beach,  with  all  its  organ  stops 
Pealing  again,  prolonged  the  roar. 

Here  are  old  favourites  like  Yeats'  Lake  Isle  oflnnis- 
free  and  Newbolt's  stirring  songs  of  the  sea,  Brooke's 
Grantchester  and  Kipling's  Sussex,  Meredith's  Lark 
Ascending  and  Thompson's  To  a  Snowflake,  Masefield's 
Beauty  and  the  best  of  Alice  Meynell. 

But  perhaps  nothing  remains  more  clearly  in  the 
mind  than  that  vigorous,  peerless  paean  of  praise  of 
Chesterton,  The  Praise  of  Dust 

"  What  of  vile  dust  ? "  the  preacher  said. 

Methought  the  whole  world  woke, 
The  dead  stone  lived  beneath  my  foot, 

And  my  whole  body  spoke. 


SOME  MORE  MODERN  POETS  99 

"  You  that  play  tyrant  to  the  dust, 

And  stamp  its  wrinkled  face, 
This  patient  star  that  flings  you  not 

Far  into  homeless  space. 

"  Come  down  out  of  your  dusty  shrine 

The  living  dust  to  see, 
The  flowers  that  at  your  sermon's  end 

Stand  blazing  silently, 

"  Rich  white  and  blood-red  blossom  ;  stones, 

Lichens  like  fire  encrust ; 
A  gleam  of  blue,  a  glare  of  gold, 

The  vision  of  the  dust. 

"  Pass  them  all  by  ;  till,  as  you  come 

Where,  at  a  city's  edge, 
Under  a  tree — I  know  it  well — 

Under  a  lattice  ledge, 

u  The  sunshine  falls  on  one  brown  head, 

You,  too,  O  cold  of  clay, 
Eater  of  stones,  may  haply  hear 

The  trumpets  of  that  day, 

"  When  God  to  all  His  paladins 

By  His  own  splendour  swore 
To  make  a  fairer  face  than  heaven, 

Of  dust  and  nothing  more." 

The  English  Association  has  done  more  to  inculcate 
a  love  of  literature  in  the  young  than  any  other  body 
in  existence,  but  it  has  never  done  more  for  the  younger 
generation  than  by  publishing  this  collection  of  the  best 
poems  of  the  day.  The  book  contains  nothing  which 
does  not  make  an  instant  appeal  to  the  heart  of  youth, 
and  each  of  the  one  hundred  and  forty-seven  selections 
has  the  true  ring  of  inspiration  and  stimulates  the  young 
to  imitate  and  excel ;  it  gives  them  a  standard  to  live 
up  to  and,  at  the  same  time,  widens  their  sympathies 
and  opens  up  new  vistas  of  romance  and  virgin  lands  as 
yet  unexplored. 


100  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

Mr  Erskine  Macdonald  has  collected  the  work  of 
twenty-four  soldier  poets,  ranging  from  Captain  Julian 
Grenf ell's  Into  Battle,  already  almost  a  classic,  to  the 
outpourings  of  Sergeant  Streets. 

No  one  of  these  brave  singers,  however,  has  so  sure 
a  touch  as  Lieutenant  E.  F.  Wilkinson,  M.C.,  whose 
two  poems,  Dad  o'  Mine  and  To  my  People,  deserve 
quotation  in  full. 

Midsummer-day,  and  the  mad  world  a-fighting, 

Fighting  in  holes,  Dad  o'  Mine. 

Nature's  old  spells  are  no  longer  delighting 

Passion-filled  souls,  Dad  o'  Mine. 

Vainly  the  birds  in  the  branches  are  singing, 

Vainly  the  sunshine  its  message  is  bringing, 

Over  the  green-clad  earth  stark  hate  is  flinging 

Shadow  for  shine,  Dad  o'  Mine, 

Shadow  for  shine. 

No  one  dare  prophesy  when  comes  an  end  to  it, 

End  to  the  strife,  Dad  o'  Mine. 

When  we  can  take  joy  and  once  again  bend  to  it, 

What's  left  of  life,  Dad  o'  Mine. 

Yet  for  one  day  we'll  let  all  slip  behind  us, 

So  that  your  birthday,  Dad,  still  may  remind  us 

How  strong  yet  supple  the  bonds  are  that  bind  us 

Through  shade  and  shine,  Dad  o'  Mine, 

Through  shade  and  shine. 

Leagues  lie  between  us,  but  leagues  cannot  sever 

Links  forged  by  love,  Dad  o'  Mine, 

Bonds  of  his  binding  are  fast  bound  for  ever, 

Future  will  prove,  Dad  o'  Mine. 

Your  strength  was  mine  since  I  first  lisped  your  name,  Dad, 

Your  thoughts  were  my  thoughts  at  lesson  or  game,  Dad, 

In  childhood's  griefs,  it  was  ever  the  same,  Dad, 

Your  hand  round  mine,  Dad  o'  Mine, 

Your  hand  round  mine. 

Strengthened  by  shadow  and  shine  borne  together, 
Comrades  and  chums,  Dad  o'  Mine, 
We  shall  not  falter  through  fair  or  foul  weather, 
Whatever  comes,  Dad  o'  Mine. 


SOME  MORE  MODERN  POETS  101 

So  in  the  years  to  be  when  you  grow  older, 

Age  puts  his  claim  in  and  weakness  grows  bolder ; 

We'll  stand  up  and  meet  them,  Dad,  shoulder  to  shoulder, 

Your  arm  in  mine,  Dad  o'  Mine, 

Your  arm  in  mine. 

How  far  we  have  travelled  from  the  sickly  senti- 
mentality of  the  nineteenth  century  here  !  This  is  the 
frank,  fearless,  outspoken  affection  of  a  boy,  not  afraid 
to  love  his  father  and  to  express  this  love  straight- 
forwardly, purely  and  strongly.  It  is  simple,  with  the 
simplicity  of  one  who  has  faced  the  eternal  reality  of 
death  and  has  no  further  use  for  the  reticence  or  the 
"  good  form  "  which  used  to  be  the  god  of  youth. 

In  the  next  poem  he  goes  still  further  and  puts  into 
exquisite  poetry  his  convictions  with  regard  to  war, 
life,  death  and  the  life  after  death. 

If  then,  amidst  some  millions  more,  this  heart 
Should  cease  to  beat, — 
Mourn  not  for  me  too  sadly  ;  I  have  been, 
For  months  of  an  exalted  life,  a  king ; 
Peer  for  these  months  of  those  whose  graves  grow  green 
Where'er  the  borders  of  our  empire  fling 
Their  mighty  arms.     And  if  the  crown  is  death, 
Death  while  I'm  fighting  for  my  home  and  king, 
Thank  God  the  son  who  drew  from  you  his  breath 
To  death  could  bring 

A  not  entirely  worthless  sacrifice, 
Because  of  those  brief  months  when  life  meant  more 
Than  selfish  pleasures.     Grudge  not  then  the  price, 
But  say,  "  Our  country  in  the  storm  of  war 
Has  found  him  fit  to  fight  and  die  for  her," 
And  lift  your  heads  in  pride  for  evermore. 
But  when  the  leaves  the  evening  breezes  stir 
Close  not  the  door. 

For  if  there's  any  consciousness  to  follow 
The  deep,  deep  slumber  that  we  know  as  Death, 
If  Death  and  Life  are  not  all  vain  and  hollow, 
If  Life  is  more  than  so  much  indrawn  breath, 


102  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

Then  in  the  hush  of  twilight  I  shall  come — 

One  with  immortal  life,  that  knows  not  Death 

But  ever  changes  form — I  shall  come  home : 

Although,  beneath 

A  wooden  cross  the  clay  that  once  was  I 

Has  ta'en  its  ancient  earthy  form  anew. 

But  listen  to  the  wind  that  hurries  by, 

To  all  the  Song  of  Life  for  tunes  you  knew. 

For  in  the  voice  of  birds,  the  scent  of  flowers, 

The  evening  silence  and  the  falling  dew, 

Through  every  throbbing  pulse  of  nature's  powers — 

I'll  speak  to  you. 

This  is  brave  and  it  is  new  ;  moreover,  and  which  is 
infinitely  more  important,  it  is  true.  It  states  a  quite 
definite  fact,  a  fact  as  comforting  and  uplifting  as  it  is 
certain.  It  is  also  poetry,  if  poetry  means  the  out- 
pourings of  a  spirit  that  will  not  be  denied,  the  expres- 
sion and  crystallisation  of  a  thought  that  cannot  be 
expressed  or  crystallised  in  any  other  way. 

This  volume  is  likely  to  prove  of  invaluable  service 
as  a  factor  in  the  new  education.  Now  that  Sir  Arthur 
Quiller-  Couch  would  have  all  our  young  men  compose 
poems,  not  in  order  to  be  poets,  but  to  perfect  them- 
selves in  the  expression  of  their  ideas,  it  is  as  well  that 
they  should  have  easy  access  to  all  that  is  best  in  the 
work  of  the  moderns. 

So  many  beginners  imagine  that  the  composition  of 
poetry  is  a  heaven-sent  gift,  that  the  lines  just  come  and 
you  write  them  down ;  here  is  a  strong  corrective  for 
such  loose  thinking.  If  every  would-be  poet  were  set 
down  to  study  the  technique  and  intricate  rhyme 
schemes  of  half  the  poems  in  this  book,  they  would 
learn  a  much-needed  lesson. 

Most  of  us  have  an  overpowering  love  for  some 
corner  of  England,  which  we  would  give  a  deal  to  be 
able  to  put  into  words.  It  will  help  us  more  than  a 
little  to  study  the  way  in  which  greater  men  have 


SOME  MORE  MODERN  POETS  103 

tackled  the  subject :  by  constant  imitation  and  con- 
scious plagiarism  we  shall  attain  originality.  This  is 
one  of  the  great  paradoxes  of  progress ;  each  man 
builds  his  edifice,  not  on  a  plan  conceived  in  his  brain 
alone,  but  out  of  a  vast  and  wide  experience,  based  on 
the  efforts  of  his  forbears.  The  nearer  they  are  to  him 
in  point  of  time  the  more  valuable  they  are,  for  youth, 
especially  the  youth  of  to-day,  is  out  of  sympathy  with 
the  Tennysonian  era ;  he  can  understand  Brooke  and 
Flecker ;  they  represent  the  pinnacle  of  genius  to 
him  .  .  .  and  after  all,  why  not  ? 

We  talk  a  good  deal  about  inspiring  the  young  with 
a  sense  of  beauty  ;  we  form  societies  to  take  them  to 
the  tops  of  hills  in  order  that  they  shall  see  and  rhapso- 
dise ...  it  is  a  far  easier  and  more  beneficial  act  to 
let  them  see  what  the  clear-sighted  visionaries  of  their 
own  age  have  to  say  about  Nature's  bounty  :  they  will 
then  extend  their  own  vocabularies  and  learn  to  keep 
their  eyes  on  the  object  and  not  indulge  in  vague  and 
misty  panegyrics  or  conventional,  insincere  idioms. 

No  one  pretends  that  the  book  is  complete ;  it  is 
enough  that  there  should  be  people  possessed  of 
sufficient  courage  to  declare  that  contemporary  poetry 
is  worthy  of  the  study  of  the  youth  of  to-day,  but  I 
should  like  a  place  to  have  been  found  for  Gilbert 
Thomas'  sonnet,  Birds  of  Passage. 

Like  swallows  in  some  grey  cathedral  square, 
Resting  awhile,  then  mounting  free  again, 
So  round  the  cloistered  temple  of  the  brain 
Flutter  the  flocks  of  thought  upon  the  air ; 
And  now  and  then,  perchance,  they  settle  there, 
But  oh,  we  strive  to  capture  them  in  vain ; 
For  never  will  the  winged  soul  remain  ; 
They  sweep  into  the  sky,  and  vanish — where  ? 
Return,  ye  swift,  shy  visitants,  return ! 
Where  have  ye  fled  ?     To  what  enchanted  shore  ? 


104  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

If  ye  our  closest  fellowship  must  spurn, 

Return,  and  bring  us  only,  as  before, 

Some  vague,  sweet  song  that  makes  the  spirit  burn — 

Some  twilight  whispering  of  faery  lore  ! 

The  Catholic  Anthology,  as  we  gather  from  its  Cubist 
cover,  is  a  violent  attempt  to  divert  our  attention  from 
what  we  technically  recognise  as  poetry  to  a  chaotic, 
disordered,  formless  type  of  versifying,  mainly  trans- 
atlantic. 

There  are  well-known  names  here,  Ezra  Pound, 
Edgar  Lee  Masters,  Harold  Monro  and  Orrick  Johns, 
but  no  one  of  them  succeeds  in  doing  more  than  mildly 
amusing  us,  except  T.  S.  Eliot,  who,  in  The  Love  Song 
of  J.  Alfred  Prufrock  and  Portrait  of  a  Lady  convinces 
us  that  a  poet  has  the  right  to  free  himself  from  the 
trammels  of  artistic  construction  on  rare  occasions. 

And  would  it  have  been  worth  it,  after  all, 

Would  it  have  been  worth  while, 

After  the  sunsets  and  the  dooryards  and  the  sprinkled  streets, 

After  the  novels,  after  the  teacups,  after  the  skirts  that  trail 

upon  the  floor — 
And  this,  and  so  much  more  ? — 
It  is  impossible  to  say  just  what  I  mean  ! 
But  as  if  a  magic  lantern  threw  the  nerves  in  patterns  on  a 

screen : 
Would  it  have  been  worth  while 
If  one,  settling  a  pillow  or  throwing  off  a  shawl, 
And  turning  toward  the  window,  should  say  :   n  That  is  not 

it  at  all, 
That  is  not  what  I  meant  at  all." 

I  grow  old  ...   I  grow  old  .   .  . 

I  shall  wear  the  bottoms  of  my  trousers  rolled. 

Shall  I  part  my  hair  behind  ?     Do  I  dare  to  eat  a  peach  ? 

I  shall  wear  white  flannel  trousers,  and  walk  upon  the  beach. 

I  have  heard  the  mermaids  singing,  each  to  each. 

I  do  not  think  that  they  will  sing  to  me. 

I  have  seen  them  riding  seaward  in  the  waves, 

Combing  the  white  waves  blown  back 


SOME  MORE  MODERN  POETS  105 

When  the  wind  blows  the  water  white  and  black. 
We  have  lingered  in  the  chambers  of  the  sea 
By  sea  girls  wreathed  with  seaweed  red  strown 
Till  human  voices  wake  us,  and  we  drown. 

These  certainly  are  lines  "  that  young  men,  tossing 
on  their  beds,  rhymed  out  in  love's  despair  to  flatter 
beauty's  ignorant  ear,"  as  Yeats  says. 

There  is  a  depth  of  feeling  and  a  striving  to  articulate, 
without  which  no  poetry  is  worth  anything.  What  we 
feel  on  laying  down  this  volume  is  a  rather  harsh  but 
quite  accurate  judgment. 

Would  it  not  be  better  for  these  young  men  to  wait 
until  they  really  knew  what  they  did  want  before  they 
put  on  paper  their  childish  gropings  after  truth  and 
beauty  ?  They  are  as  uncertain  as  autumn  leaves, 
driven  hither  and  thither  by  every  whimsical  gust  of 
wind,  inconsequent,  purposeless. 

Mr  Eliot,  for  instance,  has  all  the  makings  of  a  great 
poet,  but  in  the  day  of  his  success  his  lovers  will  think 
of  Miss  Helen  Slingsby  and  shudder  that  he  should  ever, 
even  in  childhood,  have  sunk  to  such  a  depth  of  bathos 
or  failed  to  cultivate  a  sense  of  humour.  That  is  the 
main  fault  of  all  these  Impressionists  :  they  have  no 
sense  of  humour  ;  they  strain  at  sublimity  and  achieve 
the  ridiculous  ;  they  take  themselves  far  too  seriously. 

It  is  refreshing  to  turn  from  this  side  of  America  to 
Alfred  Noyes'  Collection  of  Undergraduate  Verse,  written 
by  his  pupils  at  Princeton  University.  His  guiding 
influence  is  everywhere  evident  and  we  see  the  young 
men  developing  their  sense  of  the  poetic  in  a  lucid, 
orderly  manner ;  these  men  are  not  only  captains  of 
their  own  souls,  but  of  their  words  also. 

All  lovely  things  I  love, 
Whether  of  sky  or  sea  ; 
Earth  and  the  fruit  thereof, 


106  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

And  the  starry  company 

That  wander  through  Heaven  above, 

Singing  unceasingly. 

I  love  all  sweet- voiced  things  : 

The  coil  of  falling  streams, 

The  honeyed  murmurings 

Of  bees  in  their  noontide  dreams, 

And  the  brush  of  Night's  great  wings, 

That  a  sweeter  silence  seems. 

I  love  all  silent  thought 
Prisoned  in  cadenced  sound  ; 
And  many  a  jewel  brought 
From  hearted  caves  profound  : 
And  yet  in  all  I've  sought 
Something  I  have  not  found. 

This  is  a  far  cry  from  T.  S.  Eliot,  and  it  is  worth  while 
bearing  in  mind  that  it  is  by  a  younger  mind. 

We  see  at  once  the  influence  of  the  great  masters  of 
English  literature  translated  by  Noyes  himself : 

As  I  begin  to  see  beyond  thy  rhyme, 

And  learn  to  place  each  pleasing  sound  aright, 

And  view  the  steps  by  which  thy  verses  climb 

Through  strength  to  beauty,  and  on  from  height  to  height  ; 

Then  I  begin  to  feel  that  eagle's  lure 

Which  turns  his  gaze  toward  a  challenging  sun, 

To  leave  behind  the  dull  and  level  moor 

For  those  high  crags  where  glorious  colours  run. 

So  would  I  know  with  thee  that  steep  ascent, 

That  difficult  way  to  prospects  yet  unknown, 

The  winding  paths,  the  chasms  deeply  rent, 

The  whispering  pines  by  winds  of  poesy  blown, 

And  face  that  sun  of  song  whose  radiance  flows 

In  sky-born  colours  through  this  earth's  dark  prose. 

Here  we  see  at  once  the  truth  of  that  law  which  all 
true  geniuses  realise,  that  the  human  spirit  in  the 
height  of  its  ecstasy  desires  and   obeys  the  strictest 


SOME  MORE  MODERN  POETS  107 

laws ;  the  greatest  freedom  is  only  to  be  attained  by 
severe  apprenticeship,  a  paradox  which  needs  very 
much  to  be  brought  home  to  the  young  writers  of  to-day. 
Mr  Noyes  ought  to  be  a  proud  man  to  think  that  it  is 
owing  to  his  inspiration  that  the  younger  generation 
have  grasped  this  fact,  and  are  not  ungrateful  to 
him. 

Three  things  would  I  bring  to  you, 
Bring  as  a  man  to  his  mother  returning ; 
A  heart  that  is  young  despite  the  years  ; 
The  same  old  unfulfilled  yearning ; 
And  all  in  all,  let  be  what  would, 
The  keen,  swift  faith  that  God  is  good. 

For  these  things  do  I  owe  to  you, 

Taught  me  once  when  1  was  a  boy  ; 

And  only  the  poor  in  heart  forget 

In  graver  times  what  they  knew  in  joy, 

Or  think  since  their  own  small  world  is  sad, 

That  the  heart  of  the  world  is  aught  but  glad. 

Love  of  towers  I  learnt  from  you, 
Skyward  held  like  hopes  of  men  ; 
Love  of  bells  across  the  fields 
Heard  at  dusk  intoned — and  then 
Just  the  way  a  yellow  light 
Fell  from  a  window  in  the  night. 

The  world  is  a  world  of  Truth,  I  know, 
And  man  must  live  by  the  truth,  or  die  ; 
But  truth  is  neither  a  poor,  dried  thing 
Nor  a  strumpet,  tawdry,  gorgeous  lie  ; 
But  just  the  fact,  that  by  doing  and  giving, 
Young  dreams  come  true  while  a  man  is  living. 

So  I  would  bring  three  gifts  to  you, 
Got  from  you  by  loving  and  learning ; 
A  heart  that  is  young  despite  the  years ; 
The  same  old  unfulfilled  yearning ; 
And  all  in  all,  let  be  what  would, 
The  keen,  swift  faith  that  God  is  good. 


108  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

It  is  in  such  a  poem  as  this  I  imagine  that  Mr  Noyes 
sees  those  seeds  which  he  speaks  of  in  such  high  terms. 
"  The  splendid  task  of  carrying  on  the  torch  of  litera- 
ture," he  says  in  his  preface,  "  may  yet  be  reserved  for 
America."  Few  of  us  would  have  guessed  that  the 
extracts  I  have  quoted  were  written  by  any  except  our 
own  youthful  poets.  The  older  country  has  extended 
a  helping  hand  to  its  younger  sons  across  the  sea  and 
shown  them  that  sweetness  and  light  come  not  except 
by  arduous  practice  in  the  imitation  of  the  great 
masters.  The  undergraduates  of  Princeton  have  at 
any  rate  learnt  their  lesson  admirably,  and,  to  judge 
from  this  volume,  are  a  nest  of  singing  birds  presaging 
a  glorious  future  for  a  nation  that  has  striven  hard  to 
give  voice  to  its  high  aspirations  in  prose  and  poetry, 
without  any  too  generous  recognition  on  this  side  of  the 
Atlantic. 

In  conclusion,  I  hope  I  may  be  pardoned  if  I  introduce 
the  work  of  the  best  three  boys  who  have  passed 
through  my  hands  as  a  schoolmaster.  I  have  known 
and  attempted  to  educate  many  youthful  poets,  but 
three  of  these,  each  absolutely  individual  and  as 
different  as  possible  from  the  others,  stand  out  from 
the  rest. 

The  first,  J.  R.  Ackerley,  is  a  captain  in  the  East 
Surrey  Regiment.  At  school  he  was  an  avowed 
disciple  of  Masefield.  When  he  left  he  was  about  to 
go  up  to  Magdalene  College,  Cambridge,  when  the  wrar 
broke  out  and  he  did  the  obvious  thing.  The  influence 
of  Masefield  can  easily  be  traced  in  the  only  poem  which 
he  has  yet  had  printed,  The  Evei'lasting  Terror,  which  I 
give  in  full,  because  I  think  it  deserves  it. 


SOME  MORE  MODERN  POETS  109 

THE  EVERLASTING  TERROR 

To  Bobby 

For  fourteen  years  since  I  began 

I  learnt  to  be  a  gentleman, 

1  learnt  that  two  and  two  made  four 

And  all  the  other  college  lore, 

That  all  that's  good  and  right  and  fit 

Was  copied  in  the  Holy  Writ, 

That  rape  was  wrong  and  murder  worse 

Than  stealing  money  from  a  purse, 

That  if  your  neighbour  caused  you  pain 

You  turned  the  other  cheek  again, 

And  vaguely  did  I  learn  the  rhyme 

"  Oh  give  us  peace,  Lord,  in  our  time, 

And  grant  us  Peace  in  Heaven  as  well, 

And  save  our  souls  from  fire  in  Hell "  ; 

So  since  the  day  that  1  began 

I  learnt  to  be  a  gentleman. 

But  when  I'd  turned  nineteen  and  more 

I  took  my  righteousness  to  War. 

The  one  thing  that  I  can't  recall 

Is  why  I  went  to  war  at  all ; 

I  wasn't  brave,  nor  coward  quite, 

But  still  I  went,  and  I  was  right. 

But  now  I'm  nearly  twenty-two 
And  hale  as  any  one  of  you  ; 
I've  killed  more  men  than  I  can  tell 
And  been  through  many  forms  of  Hell, 
And  now  I  come  to  think  of  it 
They  tell  you  in  the  Holy  Writ 
That  Hell's  a  place  of  misery 
Where  Laughter  stands  in  pillory 
And  Vice  and  Hunger  walk  abroad 
And  breed  contagion  'gainst  the  Lord. 
Well,  p'raps  it  is,  but  all  the  same, 
It  heals  the  halt,  the  blind,  the  lame, 
It  takes  and  tramples  down  your  pride 
And  sin  and  vainness  fall  beside, 


110  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

It  turns  you  out  a  better  fool 
Than  you  were  taught  to  be  at  school, 
And,  what  the  Bible  does  not  tell, 
It  gives  you  gentleness  as  well. 

Oh,  God  !  I've  heard  the  screams  of  men 

In  suffering  beyond  our  ken, 

And  shuddered  at  the  thought  that  I 

Might  scream  as  well  if  I  should  die. 

I've  seen  them  crushed  or  torn  to  bits, — 

Oh,  iron  tears  you  where  it  hits ! 

And  when  the  flag  of  Dawn  unfurls 

They  cry — not  God's  name,  but  their  girls', 

Whose  shades,  perhaps,  like  Night's  cool  breath, 

Are  present  on  that  field  of  death, 

And  sit  and  weep  and  tend  them  there, 

God's  halo  blazing  round  their  hair. 

"Thou  shalt  not  kill."     But  in  the  grime 

Of  smoke  and  blood  and  smell  of  lime 

Which  creeping  men  have  scattered  round 

A  blood-disfigured  piece  of  ground, 

When  Time  weighs  on  you  like  a  ton, 

And  Terror  makes  your  water  run, 

And  earth  and  sky  are  red  with  flame, 

And  Death  is  standing  there  to  claim 

His  toll  among  you,  when  the  hour 

Arrives  when  you  must  show  your  power 

And  take  your  little  fighting  chance, 

Get  up  and  out  and  so  advance, 

When  crimson  swims  before  your  eyes 

And  in  your  mouth  strange  oaths  arise, 

Then  something  in  you  seems  to  break 

And  thoughts  you  never  dreamt  of  wake 

Upon  your  brain  and  drive  you  on, 

So  that  you  stab  till  life  is  gone, 

So  that  you  throttle,  shoot  or  stick, 

A  shrinking  man  and  don't  feel  sick 

Nor  feel  one  little  jot  of  shame  ; 

My  God,  but  it's  a  bloody  game  ! 

Oh  yes,  I've  seen  it  all  and  more, 
And  felt  the  knocker  on  Death's  door ; 
I've  been  wherever  Satan  takes  you, 
And  Hell  is  good,  because  it  makes  you. 


SOME  MORE  MODERN  POETS  111 

As  long  as  you're  a  man,  I  say, 

The  "  gentle  "  part  will  find  its  way 

And  catch  you  up  like  all  the  rest — 

For  love  I  give  the  Tommy  best ! 

No  need  to  learn  of  Christ's  Temptation 

There's  gentleness  in  all  creation, 

It's  born  in  you  like  seeds  in  pears, 

It  ups  and  takes  you  unawares, 

It's  Christ  again,  the  real  Lover 

And  not  the  corpse  we  languish  over. 

It  makes  us  see,  our  vision  clearer ; 

When  Christ  is  in  us  He  is  dearer, 

We  love  Him  when  we  understand 

That  each  of  us  may  hold  His  hand, 

May  walk  with  Him  by  day  or  night 

In  meditation  towards  the  light ; 

It's  better  far  than  paying  shillings 

For  paper  books  with  rusty  fillings 

Which  say  eternal  punishment 

Is  due  to  those  poor  men  who've  spent 

Their  lives  in  gambling,  drinking,  whoring, 

As  though  there  were  some  angel  scoring 

Black  marks  against  you  for  your  sins 

And  he  who  gets  the  least  marks  wins. 

This  was  a  word  Christ  never  sent, 

This  talk  of  awful  punishment ; 

You're  born  into  a  world  of  sin 

Which  Jesus'  touch  will  guide  you  in, 

And  when  you  die  your  soul  returns 

To  Christ  again,  with  all  its  burns, 

In  all  its  little  nakedness, 

In  tears,  in  sorrow,  to  confess 

That  it  has  failed  as  those  before 

To  walk  quite  straight  from  door  to  door : 

And  Christ  will  sigh  instead  of  kiss, 

And  Hell  and  punishment  are  this. 

And  so  through  all  my  life  and  days, 

In  all  my  walks,  through  all  my  ways, 

The  lasting  terror  of  the  war 

Will  live  with  me  for  evermore. 

Of  all  the  pals  whom  I  have  missed 

There's  one,  I  know,  whom  Christ  has  kissed, 


112  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

And  in  his  memory  I'll  find 
The  sweetness  of  the  bitter  rind — 
Of  lonely  life  in  front  of  me 
And  terror's  sleepless  memory. 

June  2,0th)  1916. 

There  are  lines  in  this  which  Masefield  himself  would 
have  been  proud  to  acknowledge  : 

As  though  there  were  some  angel  scoring 
Black  marks  against  you  for  your  sins 
And  he  who  gets  the  least  marks  wins 

is  in  the  best  Masefield  manner. 

I  like  it  for  its  honesty  and  nervous  energy.  It  is 
certainly  beyond  the  power  of  any  mere  ephemeral 
versifier,  because  of  its  perfect  crystallisation  of  a  mood. 
He  has  written  with  his  eye  on  the  object  and  brings 
home  to  us  as  a  consequence  the  precise  feelings  of  an 
imaginative  poet  in  action.  I  doubt  if  anyone  has 
portrayed  so  accurately  the  exact  state  of  mind  of  the 
poet-soldier.  I've  watched  the  progress  of  this  young 
poet  since  he  was  fourteen,  and  it  seems  to  me  that  he 
has  increased  (poetically)  in  stature  and  in  wisdom  year 
by  year  ever  since.  I  have  a  drawer  full  of  his  work, 
which  I  am  convinced  will  some  day  be  required  at  my 
hands  by  a  discerning  public.  I  can  only  give  you  his 
latest  and  let  you  form  your  own  conclusions.  It  is  no 
good  extracting  portions  of  them  ;  you  must  have  them 
in  their  entirety,  because  you  will  not  be  able  to  come 
at  them  elsewhere.  They  are  here  printed  for  the  first 
time: 


SOME  MORE  MODERN  POETS  118 

OCTOBER  23rd,   1916 


That  he  is  dead 
Seems  unbelievable, 
False,  inconceivable, 
He  was  so  young. 
Can  it  be  said 
Life  indispensable 
Falling  insensible 
Leaves  us  unsung  ? 
Picture  the  sight, — 
Clothes  hanging  muddily, 
Soppingly,  bloodily  ; 
Eyes  staring  wide  ! 
One  little  fight 
Stretching  him  rigidly, 
Clammily,  frigidly 
On  to  his  side  ! 


Picture  the  death, — 
Young  and  so  beautiful, 
Lovable,  dutiful, 
Borne  to  the  grave 
Quite  out  of  breath  ; 
Flowers  of  maternity 
Plunged  in  eternity 
Clean  and  so  brave  ! 
What  is  the  prize  ? 
England  is  unmolest, 
Happy  and  unoppressed  ? 
England  is  Free  ? 
Oh,  these  are  lies  ! 
Let  England's  glory  wane  ! 
Give  him  back  whole  again, 
Him  whom  I  bore  in  pain, 
Give  him  to  me.   .  .  . 


114  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

IF 


I  want  to  go  to  Devonshire 
To  hide  myself  away, 
And  try  to  find  the  glory-sun 
That  never  warmed  my  day ; 
To  sit  awhile  and  think  a  bit 
Of  all  that  might  have  been 
If  I  had  only  heard  of  love 
When  I  was  seventeen. 


If  only  I  had  had  a  chance 
When  I  was  still  a  child, 
Instead  of  having  smutty  friends, 
Instead  of  running  wild  ; 
Instead  of  spending  all  my  nights 
Along  with  Cunny  Jane  ; 
1  wouldn't  do  the  things  I  done 
If  I  might  live  again. 

in 

But  everything's  a'  finished  and 

There  ain't  a  second  "  try  "  ; 

I'll  have  to  go  on  aimlessly 

Until  I  come  to  die  ; 

I  never  had  a  chance  to  live, 

A  God  to  call  my  own. 

I  took  the  road  I  stood  upon 

And  walked  it  all  alone. 


I  started  off  with  Ned  and  Alf 
Before  I'd  learnt  to  think, 
And  Ned  was  hanged  in  '99 
And  Alf  'e  died  o'  drink  ; 
And  1  kept  up  with  Cunny  Jane 
Until  she  sickened  me  ; 
So  that's  the  way  I  started  off 
In  eighteen  ninety  three. 


SOME  MORE  MODERN  POETS  115 


And  now  I'm  thirty-five  or  more 
And  come  to  looking  back 
On  how  I  broke  the  law  at  eight 
By  lighting  Farmer's  stack  ; 
On  how  I  nearly  killed  a  cop 
And  spent  ten  years  in  quod, 
Because  I  never  had  a  chance 
Of  understanding  God. 


And  so  I  long  for  Devonshire 
To  hide  myself  away, 
And  try  to  find  the  glory-sun 
That  never  warmed  my  day  ; 
To  sit  a  while  and  think  a  bit 
Of  all  that  might  have  been, 
If  I  had  only  heard  of  love 
When  I  was  seventeen. 


THE  PRODIGAL  SON 


I'll  not  remain  to  waken  thee  ; 
I'll  not  remain  to  strengthen  thee  ; 
I'll  be  the  man  I  want  to  be 

Before  the  day  is  done  ; 
I'll  go  the  way  I  want  to  go ; 
I  told  t'  fulish  parson  so, 
I  made  t'  parson's  ears  glow 

An'  then  I  run  ! 


I'm  tired  o'  living  like  a  weed, 
It's  not  the  life  I  want  to  lead, 
I  don't  intend  to  go  to  seed 

An'  die  a  Farmer's  lout ! 
I'm  young,  an'  strong  an'  full  o'  grit 
I  don't  intend  to  simply  sit, 
I've  had  about  enough  of  it 

To  last  me  out. 


116  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 


in 

No  matter  what  the  Dad  allows, 

I'll  leave  the  farm  and  fields  and  sows, 

I'll  take  the  road  without  the  cows 

An'  walk  it  all  alone. 
There's  Henry  gone  an'  Alfred  too, 
An'  I  stayed  back  because  o'  you, 
But  now  I'm  off  to  see  it  through 

Upon  my  own. 

IV 

I'll  never  turn  me  back  again 
An'  seek  the  little  sunken  lane 
That  leads  me  back  to  j-ellow  grain 

An'  you  an'  shadow  joy. 
I  know  the  way  a  maiden  cries ; 
I  know  the  vainness  in  her  eyes : 
— It  isn't  hollow,  twisted  lies 

That  kill  a  boy ! 


I'll  be  the  man  I  want  to  be ; 
I'll  never  take  farewell  of  thee  ; 
I'll  take  the  road  towards  the  sea 

An'  setting  o'  the  sun. 
It  isn't  love  that  matters  here, 
It  isn't  pain,  nor  joy  nor  fear, 
It's  pluck  that  makes  you  persevere 

When  all  is  done  ! 
July  30th,  1 91 5. 

"  Masefield,"  3^011  say  ;  of  course  :  a  young  man  must 
imitate  his  masters.  It  is  only  Byron  over  again  in  his 
youth  imitating  Pope,  or  Tennyson  modelling  himself 
on  Keats.  He  has  a  sense  of  the  dramatic  which  is  all 
his  own  ;  he  is  clever  enough  to  see  this  and  his  plays 
(of  which  there  are  many)  have  not  been  acted  in 
London  theatres  solely  because  of  the  weird  plots  which 
he  persists  in  using  :  a  Cabinet  minister  throwing  a 
Cornish  labourer  over  a  cliff  in  one  instance,  and  a 


SOME  MORE  MODERN  POETS  117 

tobacconist  with  a  Swiftean  sense  of  humour  frighten- 
ing the  life  out  of  a  lady  customer  in  his  shop  by  pre- 
tending to  be  mad. 

He  has  a  direct  personal  style  which  is  rare  indeed. 
He  already  gives  promise  of  a  great  future ;  the  poems 
I  have  quoted  are  not  without  genius. 

My  second  example  is  a  cadet  at  Sandhurst,  Alec  R. 
Waugh,  son  of  the  famous  Arthur  Waugh,  worthy  scion 
of  a  great  house.  As  a  boy  he  was  impregnated  with 
a  passion  for  Wilde,  Dowson,  Rossetti,  Swinburne 
and  Byron.  He  wrote  a  sensuous  and  luscious  play 
on  Vashti,  modelled  on  Stephen  Phillips  and  Arthur 
Symons,  which  had  germs  of  beauty,  but  he  too  has 
developed  enormously  since  he  left  school. 

The  first  poem  I  quote  of  his  was  written  while  still 
at  school,  and  shows  at  once  his  debt  to  these  men. 

THE  PAGAN'S  DREAM 

I  watched  the  stately  cavalcade  of  Sulla's  triumph  passing  by, 
I  saw  the  palace  Herod  made  where  Mariamne's  beauties  lie, 
I  heard  once  more  the  fevered  groan  of  Cleopatra's  poisoned 

slave, 
And  the  long  breaker's  sullen  moan  beside  great  Pompey's 

shifting  grave. 
The  pageant  of  the  past  swept  by,  the  Pagan  held  his  former 

sway, 
And  passionate  gleamed  the  purple  sky,  with  memories  of 

yesterday. 
From  the  dim  tombs  of  ancient  years,  from    Babylon  and 

Nineveh, 
Welled  the  great  fount  of  human  tears  straining  towards  the 

shoreless  sea. 
Fantastic  forms  with  swirl  grotesque  trailing  their  rainbow 

canopy, 
Wove  into  wondrous  arabesque  a  saffron-tinted  tapestry. 
Apollo  with  his  golden  hair,  and  Helen  on  her  rose-white 

throne, 
Proserpina,  for  earth  too  fair,  and  Hera's  billowy  tresses  blown 


118  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

Across  the  ruby-painted  sun  shone  bright  beyond  the  foam  of 

time 
Where  all  the  things  in  life  begun,  the  half-dreamed  dream, 

the  unsung  rhyme, 
The  love  that  burnt  itself  to  hate,  the  Lily-Beauty  turned  to 

dross, 
The  longing  wild  unsatiate,  the  yearning  and  the  poignant 

loss, 
Sleep  on  for  ever  in  the  arms  of  rest's  eternal  slumberland 
As  Merlin  once  to  Vivian's  charms  in  that  far-off  Broceliande. 
On  silver  wings,  on  fairy  feet,  I  tripped  across  that  magic  sea, 
Called  by  that  music  bitter  sweet,  that  haunting,  clinging 

melody, 
Of  Pagan  hopes  and  Pagan  dreams,  of  spires  clad  in  amethyst, 
Of  stars  whose  lustre  faintly  gleams  out  through  a  veil  of 

shaded  mist, 
Of  icy  glaciers'  snow-tipped  peaks,  of  bright  red  wine  and 

purple  rose, 
Of  passionate  red-tinted  cheeks  where  the  fresh  bloom  of 

beauty  glows, 
Of  endless  splendid  pageantry  where  all  the  longing  of  the 

years, 
Knits  into  one  great  ecstasy,  one  note  of  laughter  and  of 

tears. 
And  there  sit  the  immortals  throned  in  silent  splendour :  all 

the  while 
Tired  men  forgetting  how  they  groaned  in  the  past  years, 

upon  this  isle 
Hear  the  slow  music  of  the  waves,  hear  the  long  echoes  of 

dead  days, 
Wafted  from  where  life's  ocean  laves  the  shores  of  night  that 

dawn  betrays. 
Here  is  the  end  of  all  life's  cares,  and  here  the  end  of  all  our 

grief, 
Here  is  the  guerdon  of  our  prayers,  for  sleep  is  long  and  life 

is  brief; 
For  love  is  but  an  hour's  unrest  and  hate  is  nought,  and  sorrow 

mirth ; 
And  here  we  reach  the  last  behest  of  all  we  yearned  for  upon 

earth, 
Here  is  the  song  and  here  the  feast,  for  through  the  crossing 

of  that  sea 
From  all  our  woes  and  pain  released  we  laugh  into  eternity. 


SOME  MORE  MODERN  POETS  119 

We   hear   the   roll    of   myriad    drums    that   herald    Caesar's 

conquering  host ; 
And  Byron  in  his  triumph  comes  from  his  well-loved  iEgean 

coast, 
While  Nero  in  his  glory  quaffs  the  wine  of  passion  and  of  love, 
And  Voltaire,  ever  cynic,  laughs  at  all  that  he  cannot  dis- 
prove. 
They  lie  who  say  that  when   the  soul  has  left  the  weary 

twitching  limb 
We  all  must  pay  a  penance  whole  for  every  pleasure,  every 

whim. 
It  is  enough  we  have  endured  enough  of  sorrow  here  below, 
By  hopes  fantastic  have  been  lured  to  pleasures  melting  as 

the  snow 
Beneath  our  passion's  burning  flame,  and  we  have  known  too 

much  of  pain, 
That  we  should  feel  the  aching  shame  of  all  our  penitence 

again. 
No  :  for  we  all  shall  soon  forget  the  numbing  anguish  and 

lament 
The    crying   for  some   Juliet,  the  pity  for  some  deed   half 

meant. 
For  we  shall  sit  in  ivory  halls  and  sate  ourselves  with  wine 

and  song 
While  music  and  love's  heat  enthralls  the  soul  that  suffered 

overlong. 
And  when  the  Pagan  pleasures  tire  and  when  the  wine  of  joy 

is  drunk, 
And  comes  the  end  of  all  desire,  when  leafless  stands  the 

withered  trunk, 
Then  shall  we  sleep  and  know  no  more,  our  eyes  undimmed 

shall  gently  close 
In  some  dark-lighted  cushioned  floor,  filled  with  the  fragrance 

of  the  rose  ; 
For  sweet  the  dancing  and  the  song ;  but  sweeter  far  the 

poppies'  bloom ; 
And  there  where  love  can  work  no  wrong,  silence  holds  sway 

within  the  tomb. 


He  has  a  quite  sure  sense  of  lilt  and  sweet  music ; 
he  is  filled  with  a  love  of  beauty,  even  if  this  beauty- 
is  acquired  at  second  hand  from  books  and  not  from 


120  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

experience.     After  all,  what  experience  do  you  expect 
from  a  schoolboy  of  sixteen  ? 

How  immeasurably  he  has  advanced  since  then  may 
be  gauged  from  the  following : — 

THE  SECRET  OF  LIFE 

Saith  the  sage  :  youth  flieth  by, 
Like  the  dawn  before  the  day : 

Soon  the  flagon  must  run  dry, 
Soon  the  rainbow  fade  away. 

Store  your  treasures  for  old  age : 
Saith  the  sage. 

Saith  the  rose  :  one  thing  is  sure, 

Nothing  is  more  sweet  than  laughter. 

Who  can  tell  what  may  endure, 

What  man  knows  what  follows  after  ? 

Take  what's  certain  ere  it  goes : 
Saith  the  rose. 

Saith  my  heart :  life's  secret  lies 

Not  alone  in  age  nor  youth, 
But  to  both  the  same  voice  cries, 

Colours  change  but  not  the  truth. 
Only  love  and  never  part : 
Saith  my  heart. 


IMMUTABILITY 

In  the  long  emptiness  of  days 
Before  I  knew  you,  on  this  hill 
I  used  to  lie  and  watch  the  rays 
Of  the  dying  sunset  quiver 
Through  the  reeds  beside  the  river, 
And  on  the  laughing  stream,  until 
It  lay  a  sheet  of  ruffled  gold. 
Long  shadows  crept  along  the  wold, 
Ghostly,  majestic  :  through  the  haze 
Shrouding  the  waters,  glimmered  faint 
Tall  lilies  swaying.   .   .  . 


SOME  MORE  MODERN  POETS  121 

.  .  .  Beautiful 
And  calm  as  some  old  martyred  saint 
The  evening  died.  .  .  . 

.  .  .   My  heart  was  full 
Of  a  wild  glory  :  joy  and  praise 
Supremely  mingled  :  Beauty  thrilled 
My  hungry  senses  :  colour  swept 
Before  my  eyes  :  my  spirit  leapt 
Knowing  its  vague  dreams  fulfilled, 
Its  yearnings  satisfied.  .   .   . 


.  .  .  But  now 
I  gaze  across  these  fields  unmoved, 
Across  these  fields  that  once  I  loved. 
For  I  have  found  you  fairer  far 
Than  morning  mist  or  evening  star. 
How  should  I  praise  the  dawn,  the  skies, 
Once  having  looked  into  your  eyes, 
That  smoulder  with  the  ardent  glow 
Of  hidden  fire  ?     Even  the  breeze 
That  flutters  through  the  swaying  trees, 
Is  not  as  soft  as  your  white  hand. 
And,  Love,  the  very  sun  is  cold 
When  set  against  the  rebel  gold 
Of  your  swift  hair.  .  .  . 

.  .  .  And  yet  I  know 
That  love  will  die ;  and  I  shall  stand 
Some  day  alone  and  watch  the  sun 
Burn  out  its  heart,  its  passion  done. 
While  the  lilies  sway,  and  night 
Trembles  in  the  wake  of  light. 
And  the  same  cool  wind  will  blow 
Through  the  reeds  beside  the  river. 
Yet  I  shall  not  weep  for  you, 
Nor  for  the  love  that  has  grown  cold. 
For  though  now  your  warm  lips  quiver 
Under  mine,  we  shall  grow  old  ; 
Old  and  past  desire,  sweet, 
Miss  the  passion  and  the  heat, 


122  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

Kiss  for  habit's  sake  .  .  .  Oh  then 
We,  who  have  been  so  brave  and  true, 
Clear-eyed  and  fearless,  shall  we  stay 
To  mock  at  love,  day  after  day 
With  words  and  make-believing,  when 
The  flame  is  out  ?     Shall  we  pretend 
That  we  love  still,  or  make  an  end 
Of  folly  nobly  ?  .  .  . 

.  .  .  Oh,  I  know 
That  you  will  turn  aside  and  go, 
Taking  your  separate  path  ;  and  I 
Shall  stand  here  as  before  :  and  gaze 
Across  the  valley  where  the  haze 
Hovers  above  the  reeds,  and  shadows 
Steal  across  the  sun-kissed  meadows. 

And,  love,  for  all  that  we're  apart, 
I  shall  feel  Beauty  in  my  heart, 
Watching  the  long  day  sink  and  die. 


8/ h  July  1916. 


SONNET 


The  contest  does  not  last  so  very  long 

That  we  should  cringe  before  it.     For  a  while 
The  proud,  disdainful  gods  look  down  and  smile 

On  us  and  on  our  efforts :  right  and  wrong 

To-day  seem  merged  in  one.     Yet,  Heart,  be  brave  ! 
Fearless  and  proud  against  immortal  power 
Let  us  stand  firm.     It  is  but  for  an  hour. 

There  is  no  need  for  fear  this  side  the  grave. 

But  if  some  dim  eternity  should  rend 
The  veil  of  silence,  and  no  bound  is  set 
To  Time  and  its  processional  of  pain  ; 
If  we  should  wake  to  journey  on  again 
With  hopeless  eyes,  unable  to  forget.  .  .  . 
There  is  the  fear.  ...   If  Death  were  not  the  end. 

6th  August  1 916. 


SOME  MORE  MODERN  POETS  128 


NOCTURNE 

The  smouldering  glow  of  sunset  shines, 
Faintly  through  the  bending  pines ; 
Twilight  silverfooted  creeps 
Down  the  dimming  paths  and  peeps 
Into  glooms  and  dark  recesses 
Covering  with  her  falling  tresses 
Gently  as  a  maid  her  lover, 
Foxglove,  violet,  and  clover. 
And  soft  scents  that  sleep  by  day 
Wake  and  through  the  darkness  stray. 
Earth  and  night  and  trees  and  sky 
Are  harpstrings  to  the  harmony 
That  built  a  city  out  of  dreams 
Beside  Scamander's  winter  streams. 

To-night  the  pulse  of  music  thrills 

No  less  than  then  :  the  wooded  hills 

Are  bathed  in  beauty  and  the  song 

Of  solitude  is  borne  along 

The  wandering  pathways  of  the  breeze 

Now  soft,  now  passionate  like  the  seas 

That  thunder  round  the  Cyclades. 

All  lovely  things  beneath  the  sun 

Blend  in  that  music  and  are  one. 

Beauty  of  colour,  tune  and  rhyme, 

Odour  of  muskrose  and  wild  thyme, 

And  your  swift  laughter.     Though  your  feet 

Tread  other  paths  and  find  them  sweet, 

Safe  from  the  shame  of  lengthening  days 

In  every  mood  that  Beauty  sways 

You  dwell  untainted.     I  can  feel 

The  fragrance  of  your  warm  breath  steal 

Over  my  face.     The  perfumed  air 

Bows  with  the  weight  of  your  rich  hair, 

And  murmuring  among  the  trees 

Your  voice  plays  truant  with  the  breeze. 

So  Love  in  after  days  when  Death 
Has  made  you  his,  and  with  cold  breath 
Silenced  your  laughter,  keen  and  free, 


124  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

Unfettered  by  mortality, 

The  sense  of  you  will  linger  still 

In  flower  and  wind  and  wooded  hill, 

And  safe  from  the  grave's  nothingness 

In  undiminshed  loveliness 

Your  lambent  spirit  yet  will  brood 

Above  the  darkling  solitude 

And  hovering  in  the  evening  air 

Make  the  fairest  things  more  fair. 

And  I  shall  find  you  when  dim  night 

In  twilight's  mantle  kisses  light. 

My  heart  an  altar  for  your  sake 

Will  burn  with  vestal  flames  that  take 

Intenser  radiance  from  the  sense 

Of  your  divine  omniscience. 

And  in  the  corners  of  my  brain 

Your  presence  will  awake  again 

The  leaping  fount  of  poetry 

With  knowledge  that  though  roses  die 

Beauty  imperishable  still 

Works  out  its  self-appointed  will. 

O  Love  behind  the  darkness  waits 
We  know  not  what :  the  jealous  fates 
Guard  well  their  secrets  ;  but  as  long 
As  life  in  fire  and  gold  leaps  strong 
Through  pulsing  veins,  and  the  glad  earth 
Scatters  its  gifts  of  love  and  mirth, 
Passion  and  Friendship,  the  bright  flame 
Of  your  quick  soul  unchanged,  the  same 
That  sings  to-night,  will  kindle  men, 
Out  of  their  agony  and  pain 
To  mould  a  heaven  out  of  thought 
And  seek  the  star  that  changeth  not. 
\6th  September  1916. 


THE  SEARCHLIGHT 

Wearied  by  the  lost  battle  of  the  day, 

And  sick  with  knowledge  that  all  fair  things  must  pass 

Sometime  into  oblivion  or  decay, 
Nightlong  I  lay  upon  the  scented  grass, 

Quiet,  at  peace  :  the  soft  wind  on  my  eyes 


SOME  MORE  MODERN  POETS  125 

Resting  its  summer  wings. 
And  I  was  free  from  the  fierce  mysteries 
And  hopeless  questionings 
Of  life  and  art  and  love. 

And  I  watched  far  above 

The  long  clear  stream  of  light, 
Flicker  and  fade  :  shine  bright  and  die 
Then  shine  again,  piercing  with  keen  relentless  eye 

The  secrets  of  the  night ; 
Seeking  the  dark  mysterious  thing 
That  hovered  somewhere  in  the  dim  expanse 
Of  high  heaped  mysteries. 
In  its  wild  dance 
Through  the  dim  skies 
Its  brilliance  for  a  moment  turned 
A  sable  cloud  lost  in  its  wandering 
Into  a  flaming  radiance  that  burned 
In  transient  eternity. 

The  Beam  passed  on,  still  searching  the  wide  sky, 

On  to  the  last  grey  limit  of  its  bound, 
For  the  dark  mystery  that  it  never  found. 

I  watched  and  watched  until  I  saw 
My  soul  and  not  the  searchlight,  move 
Its  fiery  beam,  probing  the  dark  of  outworn  law, 

Of  dead  tradition,  useless  love 
Searching  for  truth,  for  one  thing  truly  wise 
Across  a  sky  dark  with  the  secrets  of  long  generations, 
Blank  with  the  emptiness  of  hollow  nations 
To  see  against  a  host  of  lies. 
And  as  that  wandering  light,  I  found  nothing  but  the  night 
And  the  gloom  of  the  night 

Except  on  moments  when  some  mood 
That  held  a  semblance  of  the  eternal  truth, 
Before  me  burst  in  light, 
And  for  an  instant,  flamed  like  youth, 
And  then  like  youth  subsided  and  was  still. 

While  my  soul  through  the  night's  wild  solitude, 
Sought  for  the  one,  the  real,  the  imperishable. 

But  as  I  watched  that  lambent  flame 
Steadfast,  immutable,  the  same 


126  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

Dauntless  in  failure  and  reverse 
Striving  against  an  alien  universe. 
I  knew  that  sometime,  either  to-morrow  or  after  many  days, 

That  beam  would  find  the  thing  it  sought. 
And  then  the  very  night  would  blaze 

The  sky  would  totter  as  a  weak  thing  wrought 
Of  flame  and  fire  and  by  itself  consumed  : 

Colours  would  leap  and  fall  where  shadows  had  loomed, 
And  a  primrose  glow,  like  a  halo,  would  rest 
On  a  world  long  opprest. 

And  I  felt  that  I  too,  before  death 

Had  crept  and  with  sensuous  breath 
Kissed  me  to  slumber,  should  find 
Within  some  long-locked  chamber  of  my  mind 
The  truth,  the  eternal  truth,  the  secret  of  all 
That  should  light  the  pathway  of  man,  and  lead  him  afar 
From  his  sloth,  and  riot  and  carnival 
To  the  one  true  star 
That,  hid  no  longer  by  mist 
Shone  silver  and  gold,  scarlet  and  amethyst, 

Pure  as  the  mystic  rose,  warm  as  the  Cytherean, 
A  splendour,  the  mingled  glory  of  Pagan  and  Galilean. 
And  out  of  the  old  world's  dust 
A  new  world  would  rise,  clean,  laughing  and  whole, 
Untouched  by  the  trammels  of  lies  and  lust, 
With  flaming  heart  and  a  flaming  soul. 

21  st  October  19 16. 


TO  YOUR  DAUGHTER 

FOR    DORIS    AND    PETRE    MAIS 

The  Thracians  when  a  child  was  born 
In  solemn  vigil  wept,  because 

Yet  one  more  soul,  adrift,  forlorn 

Must  know  the  weight  of  mortal  laws. 

But  when  one  died,  with  revelry 
They  bore  the  silent  corpse  to  rest 

Glad  that  at  least  one  man  was  free  .  . 
To  them  not  to  be  born  was  beet. 


SOME  MORE  MODERN  POETS  127 

What  shall  be  said  of  you,  whose  eyes 

Are  full  of  infant  questionings, 
Child  for  whom  all  our  mysteries, 

And  doubts  and  fears  are  unknown  things  ? 

Your  father's  hand,  your  mother's  kiss 

Are  to  you  now  sufficient  heaven, 
Yet  a  world  waits  you  beyond  this 

Where  men  for  centuries  have  striven 

To  find  its  meaning ;  yet  have  found 

Only  that  certain  things  are  lies 
And  others  transient.  .   .  .  Now  the  ground 

Lies  heavy  on  their  sightless  eyes. 

Youth  hot  upon  its  flaming  quest 

At  length  sinks  sobbing  into  age, 
And  whimpers  for  the  unpossessed 

Dim-eyed.  .   .  .  This  is  your  heritage. 

And  yet  not  wholly  so  :  despair, 

Doubt,  disillusionment  and  death 
Belong  to  all,  in  them  you  share 

With  all  mankind  the  gift  of  breath. 

But  you  the  grim  immortals  bless 

With  something  more.     For  in  your  eyes 

Shines  soft  your  mother's  tenderness, 
Flames  fierce  your  father's  hate  of  lies. 

In  you  two  dauntless  spirits  blend 

The  love  and  force  whose  questioning 

Found  life  a  sham,  yet  strove  to  mend 
And  not  destroy  the  twisted  thing. 

One  with  the  mother-love  that  cried 

To  merge  the  weak  in  the  ideal, 
The  other  wild,  unsatisfied, 

Breaking  through  false  things  to  the  real. 

And  both  these  souls  are  one  in  you. 

This  is  your  heritage  .  .   .  the  rest 
Matters  but  little,  though  you  too 

Some  day  will  cry  that  it  is  best 


128  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

Not  to  be  born,  since  right  and  wrong 
Seem  bound  together  and  the  same 

And  dust's  the  end  of  every  song  .  .  . 
But  Happiness  is  not  life's  aim. 

A  soul  of  such  material  wrought 

Is  armed  sufficiently  to  brave 
The  teeming  myrmidons  of  doubt. 

That  is  enough  this  side  the  grave. 

Unflinching  you  will  face  the  truth. 

And  others  not  so  nobly  wise 
Will  lay  before  your  feet,  their  youth, 

Their  hopes,  and  their  heart's  treasuries. 

So  though  you  deem  the  gift  of  life 

Better  not  had,  those  others  torn 
And  bleeding  in  the  throes  of  strife 

Will  thank  their  God,  that  you  were  born. 

These  all  see  the  light  of  day  for  the  first  time  now, 
and  it  is  for  you  to  judge  their  worth.  It  is  hard  to 
criticise  the  work  of  one's  own  pupils.  One  is  apt  to  be 
prejudiced — but  they  certainly  do  express  that  con- 
tinual search  after  beauty  which  is  the  poet's  peculiar 
prerogative.  All  that  I  can  say  is  that  I  am  proud  to 
have  a  daughter  who  has  inspired  such  a  poem  as  To 
Your  Daughter,  and  whatever  fate  may  be  in  store  for 
her,  she  is  lucky  to  have  had  so  sweet  a  tribute  paid 
to  her  as  this ;  it  is  comparable  only  to  Francis 
Thompson's  poems  to  Olive  and  Viola  Meynell. 

My  last  example  is  from  a  boy,  K.  de  B.  Codrington, 
now  at  Quetta.  He  has  no  definite  master ;  he  has 
read  widely  and  deeply,  and  browsed  in  all  sorts  of 
obscure  nooks  in  the  fields  of  English  literature. 

Like  so  many  youngsters  of  to-day,  he  has  learnt  to 
sing  through  suffering  ;  his  mother,  to  whom  he  was 


SOME  MORE  MODERN  POETS  129 

devoted,  was  drowned  in  the  Persia,  and  all  his  best 
poems  are  merely  reminiscences  of  her. 

He  sings  of  Nature  and  her  appeal  to  the  instinct 
of  beauty.  I  said  that  he  had  no  definite  master,  but 
there  are  obvious  traces  of  Rupert  Brooke  here  and 
there,  and  sometimes,  though  much  less  obviously,  of 
Flecker. 

LONDON  FROM  THE  COUNTRY 

The  Sparrows  twitter  in  the  hedge 

And  nutter  by  the  window-ledge, 

And  golden-red  another  day 

Creeps  slowly  up  and  fades  to  grey. 

Great  gathering  clouds  go  sailing  by, 

Cold  and  grey  in  the  sodden  sky, 

And  softly  pattering  the  rain 

Beats  down  and  blurs  the  window-pane. 

The  poplars  by  the  garden  wall 

Sway  in  the  wind  and  dead  leaves  fall, 

All  brown  and  sodden  in  the  rain 

By  the  window,  into  the  lane. 

The  willows  whisper  in  the  wind 

And  in  the  field,  just  close  behind, 

The  wind  beats  through  the  wet  clover 

All  murmuring  :  "  The  best  is  over. 

Grow  old  and  live  and  die  with  us, 

Among  the  willows  and  the  grass." 

To-day  I  watch  the  misty  down. 

Yet  yesterday  I  slept  in  town, 

Four  stories  high  above  the  square, 

Above  the  noise  and  clatter  there, 

Lulled  by  the  traffic's  rumbling  song 

Amid  the  ever-passing  throng, 

Five  days  of  happiness  supreme, 

And  now  I'm  here  and  they're  a  dream. 

The  shops,  the  restaurants  in  Soho, 
And  everything  I  love  and  know, 
Those  matinees,  just  you  and  1, 
Are  memories,  and  here  I  lie, 


130  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

Watching  the  dawn-mists  move  and  rise, 

Dim  wisps  of  grey  against  the  skies. 

Last  night  the  arcs  were  burning  bright, 

Throwing  great  golden  rings  of  light, 

Now  flickering  above  the  throng, 

Low  dancing  to  the  traffic's  song ; 

And  here? — the  stars  gleamed  dim  and  cold 

And  overhead  the  storm-clouds  rolled  ! 

Last  night,  that  table  by  the  palm, 

With  its  old  waiter,  fat  and  calm  ; 

The  music  rising  soft  and  low, 

Faintly  in  gusts  from  down  below, 

The  clinking  sound  of  touching  glass, 

As  the  quick  waiters  come  and  pass, 

And  you  beside  me,  sitting  there 

As  if  that  night  wrould  last  a  year. 

The  hanging  ivy  moves  and  sighs, 
And  slow  the  rose-sprays  dip  and  rise, 
And  the  wind  blows  by  the  clover, 
Still  whispering  : — "  The  best  is  over." 


EVENING  CLOUDS 

Fair  tints  of  evening  in  the  sky, 

Why  haste  away  so  soon  ? — 
The  wind  still  whispers  on  the  hill 

And  lingers  on  the  dune. 

The  daffodils  still  nod  their  heads 
And  bend  before  the  breeze, 

And  still  the  painted  butterflies 
Hang  by  the  apple-trees. 

Above  the  swallows  homeward  fly 

And  circle  round  the  eaves, 
Yet  day  still  loiters  in  the  lane 

And  glimmers  on  the  leaves. 

Night  falls,  and  thou  art  gone,  too  soon, 

Fair  pledges  of  the  day, 
And  as  the  stars  come  creeping  out, 

Thy  glories  fade  away. 


SOME  MORE  MODERN  POETS  131 


SPRING,  1916 

Winter  is  gone  and  spring  is  here  again 

All  green  with  tender  buds,  and  hung  with  dew,% 

Loud  sing  the  birds  in  every  hedge  and  lane, 
Sweet  songs  of  love,  such  love  I  bore  to  you. 

And  by  the  trees  all  fresh  with  morning  rain, 
Like  stars  at  evening  breaking  forth  anew, 

So  bright  you'd  think  they  never  fade  or  wane, 
The  gold-eyed  primrose  cast  a  lighter  hue. 

The  dancing  sunshine  and  the  birds  refrain, 
In  all  I  see  or  hear,  dim  thoughts  of  you 

Come  back,  like  stabs  of  long-dead  pain, 
And  every  beauty  stirs  the  wound  anew. 

Last  year  you  felt  the  waking  sun's  warm  kiss, 

And  watched  the  buds  break  out, — last  year,  and  this. 


ALMA  MATER 

Sighs  the  wind  in  the  scented  limes 
Just  as  it  did  in  olden  times, 
Singing  songs  of  the  dim  to-be, 
Days  that  were  then  but  dreams  to  me  ? 

Do  the  bells  still  chime  along 
Each  lingering  quarter  with  their  song, 
From  early  hall  to  afternoon, 
Chiming  away  the  time  too  soon  ? 

Still  do  the  dancing  sunbeams  fall, 
Glinting  down  by  the  library  wall, 
Glinting  down  by  the  gargoyle's  head, 
Painting  the  tiles  a  golden  red  ? 

Do  they  go  where  we  used  to  go 
And  do  the  things  we  used  to  do — , 
Roll  on  the  field  at  half-past  three, 
Bathing  at  six  and  back  for  tea  r 


132  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

Rules  all  round,  yet  never  so  free, 

Is  it  just  as  it  used  to  be  ? 

Are  there  shadows  still  on  the  grass, 

— And  do  the  clouds  still,  laughing,  pass? 

Others  go  where  we  used  to  walk 
And  linger  where  we  used  to  talk, 
Times  have  altered  everywhere, 
Now  strange  faces  turn  to  stare  : 

Unknown  faces  turn  to  stare, 
With  eyes  that  no  remembrance  bear, 
Time  has  flown  and  the  day  was  short 
When  I  too  loitered  through  the  court : 

Only  the  same  old  heart-felt  love, 
Only  the  laughing  clouds  above, 
Only  the  wind  in  the  linden  tree, 
Sings  the  same  old  songs  to  me. 


A  REQUIEM 

Fold  thine  arms  upon  thy  breast, 
Close  thine  eyes  and  take  thy  rest. 
Sunset  in  the  golden  west, 
Glorious,  dies. 

I  will  sing  no  dirge  for  thee, 
For  in  every  brake  and  tree 
Birds  sing  out  in  melody, 
To  grey  skies. 

So,  now  thou  hast  gone  from  me, 
I  will  sing  my  melody  ; 
Day  grows  old,  to  wane  and  die, 
Yet  to  rise. 

Still  the  wind  stirs  the  roses, 
Hung  in  great  fragrant  posies, 
But  your  sunset  ne'er  loses, 
Golden  skies. 


SOME  MORE  MODERN  POETS  138 

Golden-tinted  clouds  sail  by, 
Twilight  creeps  across  the  sky, 
Shadows  fall  and  lightly  lie, 
On  the  eyes. 

Night  falls  gleaming  in  the  west, 
Thou  who  wast  of  all,  the  best, 
Fold  thy  arms  and  take  thy  rest, 
Close  thy  eyes. 

As  usual,  I  am  afraid  to  criticise  them,  because  they 
are  too  near  to  me.  They  were  shown  up  as  work  .  .  . 
and  amid  all  the  humdrum  platitudes  and  inconse- 
quent nonsense  that  boys  produce  as  "  prep.,"  to  come 
upon  one  such  poem  as  Requiem  is  like  reading  a  play 
of  Goldsmith  after  Mrs  Aphra  Ben,  or  a  criticism  of 
Dixon  Scott  after  the  literary  editor's  reviews  in  a 
halfpenny  evening  "  rag."  I  can  only  murmur  to 
myself  :  "  Exquisite,"  "  Beautiful,"  and  to  the  pupil : 
"  Yes,  yes,  but  what  about  technique  ?  These  lines 
don't  scan."  It  is  the  schoolmaster's  special  mission 
never  to  encourage,  always  to  pick  holes ;  for  what 
reason  I  know  not. 

All  I  feel  at  the  moment  is  a  fierce  pleasure  that 
Ackerley,  Waugh  and  Codrington  all  came,  at  one 
time  or  another,  under  my  influence.  To  me  as  an 
individual  they  owe  less  than  nothing  ;  to  the  books  I 
put  into  their  hands,  more  than  they  will  ever  acknow- 
ledge. I  refuse  to  believe  that  their  poems  are  any 
whit  inferior  to  the  majority  of  those  which  I  have 
quoted  elsewhere  in  this  paper  ;  the  only  difference  lies 
in  the  fact  that  they  still  have  to  make  their  name,  to 
find  a  publisher  and  a  public. 

It  staggers  me  to  think  that  there  are  probably 
hundreds  of  poets  at  this  moment  working  quietly  in 
this  country,  as  good  as  these,  of  whom  we  have  heard 
literally  nothing  ...  it  is  the  finest  sign  of  our  times. 


134  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

You  may  talk  about  the  Renascence  of  Wonder,  of  the 
Elizabethan  lyricists,  and  other  golden  periods  of 
English  literature,  but  I  feel  absolutely  certain  on  this 
one  point,  that  the  greatest  age  in  our  own  national 
history,  if  not  in  that  of  the  whole  world,  is  here 
and  now ;  not  as  individuals,  but  collectively  we  are 
living  in  the  supreme  age  of  lyrical  sweetness ;  never 
before  has  beauty  been  so  sought  after  .  .  .  and 
the  reason  ?  Is  it  not  simply  because  of  the  constant, 
never-ending  blare  of  the  trumpets  of  ugliness  on  every 
side  of  us  ?  Action  and  reaction,  cause  and  effect,  the 
swing  of  the  pendulum.  It  is  science;  it  is  logic  ;  it 
is  life. 


THE    MODERN   NOVEL 

THE  novel  proper,  as  we  now  understand  the 
term,  is  supposed  to  have  started  with  Mr 
Wells,  in  Love  and  Mr  Lewisham,  some  fifteen 
years  ago,  perhaps  as  a  direct  result  of  the  shaking  up 
we  received  during  the  Boer  War.  After  flourishing  for 
this  short  period  with  an  almost  astounding  brilliance, 
there  are  now  not  wanting  critics  who  declare  that  as  a 
branch  of  letters  novel- writing  is  decadent  and  quickly 
dying  ;  that  the  result  of  this  war  will  bring  in  a  new 
vehicle  to  express  our  thoughts  and  aspirations.  What 
I  think  these  critics  mean  to  imply  is  that  the  form  of 
art  in  question  has  been  so  travestied  and  degraded 
that  the  true  artist  will  soon  turn  with  loathing  from 
this  medium  and  discover  a  fresh  method  of  imparting 
whatever  message  he  has  to  deliver. 

But  their  reasoning  is  not  sound.  Who  in  his  senses 
doubts,  for  instance,  that  the  theatre  of  this  country  has 
a  future  before  it  of  as  yet  unguessed-at  possibilities  ? 
We  had  a  glimpse  in  1912  and  1913  in  the  rapid  spread 
of  repertory  companies,  in  the  genius  of  Stanley 
Houghton,  Yeats,  Synge,  Chesterton,  Shaw  and 
Bennett ;  the  stage  was  coming  into  its  own  at  last. 
The  war  broke  out,  domestic  problems  had  to  be  shelved 
and  gay  recreation  for  us  all  became  the  cry,  with  the 
result  that  the  only  sort  of  theatre  we  care  to  visit 
these  days  is  that  in  which  we  can  indulge  in  cheery 
laughter  and  forget  for  the  space  of  three  hours  the 
darkness  and  horror  of  our  time.  This  is  the  day  of 
"  Revue,"  and  it  shows  sheer  ingratitude  on  our  part 

135 


136  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

if  we  join  with  those  biased  judges  who  would  away 
with  lightness,  frivolity  and  jocund  dance  because 
(according  to  these  poor,  weak-witted  fools)  it  under- 
mines our  morals  and  destroys  our  intellect,  It  does 
nothing  of  the  sort ;  it  revives  us,  it  tends  to  make  us 
cheerful,  it  helps  us  to  carry-on  and  not  give  way  to 
ghoulish  fears  and  despair.  But  the  day  of  the  revue 
is  not  for  ever  ;  with  the  coming  of  peace  the  stage  will 
become  in  the  end  what  we  intend  it  to  become,  the 
platform  from  which  we  can  thrash  out  the  problems 
that  beset  us  with  regard  to  life  and  love  and  death. 

On  the  other  hand,  the  trashy,  noxious,  prurient, 
bastard  novel  increases  and  multiplies  and  is  as  strong 
as  mongrels  usually  are.  It  is  not  with  these  that  I  am 
concerned  to-day  ;  it  is  with  the  score  or  so  of  great- 
hearted men  and  women  who  keep  their  head  above  the 
water  and  write,  not  for  the  business  man's  leisure 
hours,  nor  in  order  to  fill  up  the  evenings  of  the  lonely, 
stupid  vicar's  daughter,  but  (for  the  only  reason  that 
justifies  men  in  writing  anything  at  all)  because  they 
must  .  .  .  because  their  own  lives  are  so  appallingly 
complicated  that  they  must  advise  others  not  so 
experienced  how  to  extricate  themselves  from  the 
labyrinth  by  which  they  are  encompassed. 

It  follows,  then,  that  the  first  point  to  be  noticed  about 
the  present-day  novelists  is  their  sense  of  psychology  ; 
they  are  introspective—  and  in  that  they  are  un- 
like their  fathers  in  art.  We  look  in  vain  to-day  for 
the  simple,  full-blooded,  narrative  style  of  Fielding,  the 
quietude  of  Jane  Austen,  the  sentimentality  of  Dickens, 
the  dogmatic  baldness  of  George  Eliot,  the  historic 
sense  of  Scott  (thank  God),  the  uncleanness  of  Sterne, 
the  intellectual  obscurity  of  Mered ith,  and  we  are  glad 
of  it. 

The  novelists  of  to-day  have  broken  free  from  all 


THE  MODERN  NOVEL  137 

tradition,  not  because,  as  their  elders  so  often  think,  that 
they  like  shocking  people-  tilting  at  existing  conven- 
tions or  descending  to  the  sordid  but  solely  because 
they  are  intent  upon  one  thing  alone,  the  search  after 
truth.  Like  the  great  scientists  and  all  true  reformers, 
they  are  content  to  take  nothing  upon  trust ;  they  must 
prove  all  things  and  hold  fast  to  that  which  they  find 
to  be  good.  Now,  to  be  accurate,  this  definition  of 
their  aims  necessarily  makes  us  adjust  our  jDoint  of 
view  about  the  date  of  the  beginning  of  these  traits. 
It  is  not  Love  and  Mr  Lewisham  but  The  Way  of  All 
Flesh  that  holds  the  place  of  honour  as  the  pioneer  of 
this  movement. 

In  that  book,  which  might  have  been  produced  this 
season,  so  modern  (in  my  present  sense  of  the  word) 
it  is,  we  see  a  boy  brought  up  in  the  deadening  atmos- 
phere of  a  country  parsonage,  exceedingly  religious, 
bent  on  taking  Orders,  until  he  finds  that  he  cannot 
honestly  conform  to  the  accepted  belief  in  the  efficacy 
of  infant  baptism.  It  is  strictly  autobiographical,  and 
gives  us,  with  a  wealth  of  detail,  all  the  doubts  that 
assail  the  mind  of  youth  with  regard  to  the  myriad 
beliefs  which  his  elders  hold  quite  complacently,  but, 
according  to  his  point  of  view,  quite  unreasoningly 
and  therefore  immorally. 

And  this  brings  me  to  my  first  great  rock  on  which 
so  many  writers  split,  the  relation  of  life  to  art.  How 
far  has  the  novelist  the  right  to  transcribe  from  life  ? 
How  far  ought  he  to  aim  at  the  objective  and  the 
impersonal  ? 

If  we  listen  to  one  who  was  himself  both  a  consum- 
mate artist  and  able  critic,  R.  L.  Stevenson,  we  should 
conclude  that  no  art  ever  dares,  in  Henry  James's 
phrase,  to  compete  with  life.  Life  is  monstrous,  infinite, 
illogical,  abrupt  and  poignant ;   art  is  neat,  finite,  self- 


138  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

contained,  rational,  flowing  and  emasculate ;  yes,  if 
you  please,  I  repeat — emasculate. 

A  man  settling  down  to  write  a  novel,  just  like  his 
brother  artist,  the  musician  or  the  painter,  definitely 
decides  upon  a  theme,  which  he  harps  upon,  ruthlessly 
pruning  away  all  irrelevancies  until  he  has  finished  his 
artistic  conception,  which  is  orderly,  consecutive  and 
intelligible.  Now  life  is  seldom,  if  ever,  intelligible, 
never  consecutive  and  most  certainly  not  orderly ; 
your  true  artist  half  shuts  his  eyes  to  the  dazzle  and 
confusion  of  reality  and  flees  the  challenge  of  life, 
pursuing  instead  an  independent  and  creative  aim  : 
he  does  not  pretend  to  give  a  true  picture  of  life  :  rather 
does  he  make,  so  far  as  he  is  able,  his  story  typical, 
which  accounts,  of  course,  for  Sam  Weller,  Mr  Micawber 
and  Mrs  Gamp.  Hence  follow,  to  the  artist's  horror 
on  the  publication  of  each  fresh  work,  a  whole  series  of 
misunderstandings,  each  one  of  the  small  circle  of  his 
acquaintances  endeavouring  to  "place"  themselves 
and  other  of  his  friends  in  the  book-  whereas,  of 
course,  no  man  deliberately  paints  any  man  as  he 
sees  him,  but,  taking  a  trait  here  and  a  trait  there, 
presents  a  composite  portrait  of  the  creature  of  his 
imagination. 

Lest  I  tire  you  with  these  general  hypotheses,  as  if  I 
were  here  to  prove  a  proposition  in  geometry,  let  me 
descend  to  the  particular  score  or  so  of  writers  whom  I 
have  in  mind  as  representative  of  the  art  of  novel- 
writing  at  its  best  to-day,  and  I  will  try  to  be  as  modern 
as  I  possibly  can  be. 

But  before  I  can  do  this  I  must  perforce  call  your 
attention  to  an  astonishing  sameness  in  the  writers  of 
our  era.  Their  theme  is  nearly  always  the  same  :  they 
take  a  small  child  and  work  out,  with  miraculous 
accuracy  and  meticulous  care,  his  or  her  attitude  to  life 


THE  MODERN  NOVEL  139 

from  its  earliest  infancy.  It  is  nearly  always  an  only 
child,  and  hence  imaginative,  queer  and  lonely. 

It  does  not  fit  into  the  curriculum  anywhere,  least  of 
all  into  the  rarefied  atmosphere  of  a  Public  School  (we 
have  to  go  to  E.  F.  Benson,  beloved  of  dowagers  and 
bookstall  agents  for  that) ;  Oxford  days  (all  heroes  go 
to  Oxford  nowadays)  are  merely  an  occasion  for  scorch- 
ing his  wrings,  owing  to  the  sudden  liberty;  he  disappears 
in  a  chastened  frame  of  mind  to  an  East  End  Settlement 
or  Bohemian  Chelsea,  or  Paris-  and  there  he  meets  with 
further  chastisement  from  a  world  which  deals  harshly 
with  those  wrho  have  little  respect  for  its  canons  and 
refuse  to  play  for  safety.  We  leave  the  protagonist 
fighting,  having  not  so  much  worked  out  his  salvation 
as  cut  away  a  few  of  the  fimgus  growths  that  impeded 
his  development. 

What  are  we  to  make  of  a  set  of  writers  who  always 
take  this  line  ?  Two  things  about  them  stand  out 
clear  :  they  are  not  lacking  in  courage,  and  they  are 
broad-minded.  I  wonder  if  it  has  ever  struck  the 
opponents  of  the  new  school  that  there  is  an  intense 
amount  of  sorrow  in  the  lives  of  all  these  big  present- 
day  writers.  A  man  or  woman  does  not  lightly  give 
up  old  comfortable  beliefs  and  scandalise  his  mother, 
alienate  his  best  friends  and  cut  himself  adrift  from 
all  those  who  would  help  him  if  only  he  kept  in  the 
groove  of  the  Victorians — without  a  very  real  sense 
of  dread  and  misgiving. 

After  all,  he  may  be  wrong.  All  his  elders  tell  him 
that  he  is  ;  he  is  held  up  as  a  scapegoat ;  respectability 
shuns  him  and  conventional  morality  labels  him  as 
abandoned.  All  he  has  to  hold  on  to  is  the  fiery  white 
burning  flame  within,  which  is  the  manifestation  of  the 
divine  as  he  sees  it,  the  Holy  Ghost  of  honesty  ;  it 
needs  more  than  a  little  courage  to  follow  the  Grail 


140  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

which  your  father  tells  you  is  a  will-o'-the-wisp  ;  it  hurts 
such  a  man  abominably  to  be  told,  as  he  is  on  every 
occasion,  that  this  much-vaunted  op  en-mind  edness 
and  breadth  is  only  a  euphemism  for  lack  of  depth 
and  shallowness.  There  may  be  lack  of  depth  in  the 
new  writer  before  he  has  found  his  feet ;  the  very 
shallows  are  sometimes  mistaken  by  the  passionate 
spirit  for  the  deep  waters,  but  he  soon  learns  to  profit 
by  his  mistakes.  No — it  is  not  the  spirit  that  is  lack- 
ing ;  the  impulse  is  all  right — publishers  will  tell  you 
that  they  are  sometimes  frightened  by  the  amount  of 
good  stuff  which  is  sent  to  them  daily.  What  is  wrong 
is  the  absence  of  any  technique ;  so  anxious  are  these 
firebrands  to  give  voice  to  their  disquietude,  so  keen  to 
be  gospellers,  that  they  forget  that  he  who  practises  an 
art  must  obey  the  laws  that  govern  that  art.  They 
think  that  it  is  enough  to  have  something  to  say  and 
say  it,  which  would  be  strictly  true  were  novel-writing 
a  sort  of  photography,  a  literal  transcription  from  life. 
It  is  something  very  different  from  this  even  if  we 
agree  that  novels  are  now  a  chemical  analysis  of  life. 
In  the  scientific  sense  this  is  not  quite  true ;  it  is  im- 
possible to  put  down  on  paper,  with  precise  verisimili- 
tude, what  you  have  evolved  as  a  result  of  your  tests 
with  alkalis  and  acids ;  the  compound  of  emotions, 
impressions  and  volitions  are  not  so  easy  to  disin- 
tegrate, the  human  factor  looms  too  large ;  it  is  men's 
souls  that  you  are  striving  to  analyse  and  the  process 
brings  tears  of  shame  and  pity ;  sympathy  of  a  very 
acute  kind  is  essential  in  the  analyst,  which  is  obviously 
not  a  feature  that  enters  into  the  calculation  of  the 
chemist.  To  put  it  even  more  plainly,  there  is  no 
ease  in  these  new  novels  :  they  are  uncomfortable,  and 
designedly  so ;  they  do  not  make  for  happy,  restful 
evenings  ;   they  are  purgative  pills  for  the  soul,  tearing 


THE  MODERN  NOVEL  141 

it  up  by  the  roots  lest  it  should  die  for  want  of  exercise 
or  become  sluggish  through  inaction. 

And  here  I  am  constrained  against  my  wish  to  have 
to  talk  on  a  theme  that  apparently  causes  quite  a 
number  of  hostile  critics  to  prejudge  these  feverish 
reformers  and  banish  their  wrork  summarily  at  sight. 
The  theme  is  realism.  The  fact  that  stoats  slaughter 
rabbits  in  a  bestially  cruel  manner,  that  Nature  is 
harsh,  ugly  and  unsympathetic,  that  man,  in  Meredith's 
phrase,  has  not  yet  rounded  Cape  Turk  in  his  attitude 
to  women,  that  mud  and  dirt  exist,  terrifies  these 
writers  :  they  are  honest,  so  they  refuse  to  blind  them- 
selves to  the  truth  ;  they  are  searching  for  beauty  and 
meet  ugliness,  so  they  must  needs  write  down  the  im- 
pression it  makes  on  them.  Hence  follows  the  croak  of 
the  "  unco'  guid  "  about  indecent  and  revolting  details. 
The  coward  trick  of  employing  asterisks  is  the 
resort  of  all  the  hucksters  and  the  popularity  hunters, 
while  the  band  of  twenty  stalwarts  goes  its  way,  heed- 
less of  the  cries  of  '4  Shame,"  and  in  the  end  out  of  the 
sordid  they  evolve  splendour,  out  of  the  grotesque, 
beauty,  out  of  the  shams  and  lies,  truth.  So  realism 
comes  to  mean  reaction  against  the  comfortable,  dull, 
cowardly  attitude  to  life  which  was  so  characteristic  of 
the  eighteen-nineties.  It  does  not  mean,  and  never 
has  meant,  playing  in  the  mire  for  love  of  mud.  I 
refuse  to  dwell  on  the  point  further.  Let  me  come  to 
the  individual  members  of  my  score. 

I  will  take  the  women  first.  It  is  a  curious  thing  that 
whereas  the  sexes  have  never  conflicted  in  the  wrorld  of 
poetry  (where  are  Christina  Rossetti  and  Mrs  Browning 
when  set  up  against  Keats,  Milton,  Shelley  and  the  rest 
of  our  English  singers  ?)  as  novelists,  women  hold  their 
own  easily.  There  have  been  many  ready  to  acclaim 
Jane  Austen  as  worthy  of  a  place  nearer  the  Shake- 


142  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

spearean  throne  than  any  other  of  our  writers,  and  she 
is  not,  like  Jael,  alone.  So  to-day  we  have  at  least  eight 
places  among  my  score  taken  by  women — Ivy  Low, 
Viola  Meynell,  Ethel  Siclgwick,  Rose  Macaulay,  Dorothy 
Richardson,  Miss  E.  H.  Young,  Sheila  Kaye-Smith  and 
May  Sinclair.  I  will  content  myself  with  five.  It  is  no 
argument — perhaps  you  are  thinking  of  it — to  suggest 
that  our  worst  writers  are  also  women.  Each  of  these, 
in  her  individual  way,  fans  the  flame  of  revolt  and 
drives  home  the  crudity  of  life,  the  inexplicability  of 
it  all,  the  need  for  courage  to  test,  to  experience,  to 
venture  all  in  the  cause  of  beauty  and  truth. 

Ethel  Sidgwick  is  no  mean  disciple  of  Meredith  and 
James.  The  Accolade  would  have  been  welcomed  by 
either  ;  she  represents  the  intellectual,  aristocratic  side 
of  the  quarrel.  Certainly  impersonal,  she  yet  lives 
again  in  her  characters,  who  are  living  men  and  women, 
full  of  human  frailty  and  human  passions  and  of  infinite 
charm,  even  when  they  fall  short,  as  all  the  heroes  and 
heroines  in  the  novels  under  discussion  do  fall  short,  of 
the  high  calling  whereto  they  were  called. 

She  recognises,  as  do  the  others,  how  amazingty  swift 
the  transition  is  between  the  sublime  and  the  ridiculous, 
how  in  a  second  of  time  a  coward  may  become  brave, 
a  good  man  turn  villain ;  in  other  words,  she  refuses  to 
believe  in  the  old  conventional  theory ,  which  is  all  right 
on  the  boards  of  the  Lyceum  (The  Morning  Post  would 
say  that  it  was  the  only  safe  guide  in  life),  that  men  can 
be  divided  into  sheep  and  goats ;  if  they  could  there 
would  be  no  need  for  our  age  at  all ;  there  would  be  no 
problem  ;  it  is  the  question  of  shadows  and  half  lights 
and  tricky  optical  illusions  of  the  soul  that  so  worries 
us.  If  all  were  either  white  or  black  this  paper  would 
be  meaningless  and  so  would  the  writing  of  novels. 

Ivy  Low  and  Viola  Meynell  have  much  in  common 


THE  MODERN  NOVEL  143 

and  can  be  grouped  together.  They  follow  what  their 
enemies  call  the  convention  of  their  school,  the  con- 
vention of  unconventionality,  and  depict  heroes  who 
have  nothing  in  them  of  the  heroic  ;  feckless,  vacillat- 
ing creatures  who  achieve  nothing  though  they  pass 
through  indescribable  tortures  in  their  endeavour  to 
make  something  of  their  lives.  Now,  your  brusque 
business  man  (I  take  him  as  a  type  :  he  doesn't  exist 
at  all  except  in  our  brains,  but  he  is  useful,  just  as  the 
King  is  useful — to  hang  a  concrete  idea  on)  gives  little 
shrift  to  the  weak  and  takes  but  a  small  interest  in 
their  puny  efforts  to  make  good.  That  really  is 
typical  of  us  as  a  people ;  we  admire  strong,  successful 
people.  Who  is  there  who  dare  confess  to  his  soul  that 
he  does  not  admire  Mr  Selfridge,  Mr  Bottomley  and 
Lord  Northcliffe?  What  we  need  to  cultivate  far 
more  is  a  feeling  of  sympathy  with  the  weak,  not 
maudlin,  sentimental  claptrap  towards  the  poor  and 
needy  (that  is  our  everlasting  shame  as  a  country,  not 
as  individuals,  and  organisation,  not  Dickens'  system, 
is  the  only  cure),  but  a  tolerant  attitude  towards  those 
who  are  less  well  endowed  with  any  of  this  or  the 
next  world's  good  attributes — the  uneducated  tub- 
thumper  who,  behind  all  his  low  cunning  and  un- 
reasoning hatred  for  what  he  calls  the  "  aristocrats," 
has  something  fine  in  him;  the — well,  I  don't  want 
to  waste  time  giving  instances — roughly  speaking,  I 
mean  the  stunted,  the  malformations  that  crowd  every- 
where, the  miserable,  unprepossessing  nursery 
governess  with  the  capacity  for  deep  passion.  It  is 
the  unsuspected  depths  in  everybody  that  we  want 
to  get  at.  Men  do  low,  blackguardly  acts  and  yet 
are  lovable ;  girls  have  neither  brains,  nor  looks, 
nor  strength,  and  yet-  there  lurks  beneath  the 
forbidding    exterior    something- well,    that    is   what 


144  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

Viola  Meynell  and  the  rest  of  them  want  to  find  out 
and  want  us  to  find  out  in  the  lives  of  those  near  to  us 
who  are  miserable  and  neglected  as  of  no  account.  It 
is  hard  to  group  these  writers  together  like  this,  but  I 
think  the  guiding  principle  that  is  common  to  all  of 
them  is  the  avoidance  at  all  costs  of  snobbery — snobbery 
of  any  kind.  These  accidental  pronunciations,  these 
tricks  of  eating,  these  vulgar  colloquialisms,  these 
dowdy  clothes,  these  astonishing  limitations  all  make 
us  so  deuced  superior.  As  this  is,  like  nearly  every- 
thing I  do,  an  intensely  personal  paper,  I  will  elaborate 
what  I  mean  a  little  further.  I  know  nothing  whatever 
about  pictures,  but  by  a  very  happy  accident  I  really 
do  like  the  work  that  is  supposed,  by  the  only  artists 
whom  I  know,  to  be  the  best  we've  got.  I  mean,  of 
course,  Augustus  John,  Mark  Gertler,  Nevinson, 
Rothenstein  and  so  on.  The  sight  of  a  Blair  Leighton, 
a  Marcus  Stone,  a  Landseer  or  a  Dicksee  makes 
me  physically  ill — and  yet — well,  my  own  house  is 
crowded  with  these  criminal  things.  I  keep  them  on 
purpose — I  know  now  what  I  like — but  I  keep  these 
in  remembrance  of  the  time  when  I  bowed  to  popular 
opinion  and  gave  my  own  judgment  no  chance.  And 
yet  my  novelist  friends,  men  of  taste  and  judgment, 
don't  laugh  at  me — they  are  not  snobs ;  they  don't 
even  laugh  at  me  behind  my  back.  .  .  . 

Now,  it's  these  people  who  have  given  me  a  soul  : 
they  haven't  laughed  ;  they  have  tried  to  find  where 
my  limitations  extend.  Other  people  don't :  other 
people  are  snobs.  I've  explained  that  badly.  These 
women  writers  are  full  of  the  milk  of  human  kindness 
and  extend  their  love  to  those  who  seem  least  of  all 
deserving  of  it.  The  only  people  they  cannot  stomach 
are  the  safe,  self-complacent  men  and  women  who 
have  been  nurtured  from  their  earliest  youth  in  the 


THE  MODERN  NOVEL  145 

established  tradition  and  done  all  the  right  things  in  the 
right  way,  even  to  marrying  and  being  buried. 

Of  my  dozen  or  so  male  writers  I  propose  to  take 
Conrad  first,  not  necessarily  because  he  is  greater  or  less 
than  any  of  the  others,  but  because  he  stands  rather 
outside  the  group.  We  ought  to  have  been  reading 
him  thirty  years  ago,  only,  being  led  by  the  critics  who 
are  like  a  man  who,  through  oversmoking,  can't  tell  a 
Woodbine  from  a  Weinberg,  we  never  recognised  his 
genius  until  almost  too  late.  One  point  he  has  in  com- 
mon with  the  younger  school — in  psychological  analysis 
lies  his  greatness ;  his  difference  lies  in  the  fact  that 
whereas  Bennett  and  the  rest  don't  care  "tuppence" 
about  narrative,  he  revels  in  the  telling  of  a  tale.  He  is 
a  born  raconteur ;  he  tells  a  story  in  the  best  possible 
way  ;  he  looks  at  it  from  every  point  of  view  ;  he  has 
taken  a  most  valuable  leaf  out  of  Browning's  book — I 
often  wonder  quite  how  much  Conrad  owes  to  The  Ring 
and  the  Book.  I  again  often  wonder  whether  a  finer 
analysis  of  a  boy's  life  has  ever  been  made  than  Conrad 
made  of  that  excessively  romantic  son  of  the  parsonage, 
inscrutable  of  heart,  tearing  himself  out  of  the  arms  of 
a  jealous  love  at  the  sign,  at  the  call  of  his  exalted 
egoism.  He  leaves  a  living  woman  to  celebrate  a  pitiless 
wedding  with  a  shadowy  ideal  of  conduct.  But  you 
all  know  the  story  ;  alone  among  modern  books  we 
have  here  a  hero  who  is  quite  certain  of  himself,  realises 
quite  definitely  that  errors  are  irretrievable  and  works 
out  his  scheme  of  expiation  to  perfection. 

Wells,  too,  in  some  degree  stands  a  little  aloof  from 
the  moderns  ;  the  best  thing  about  him  which  he  holds 
in  common  with  Arnold  Bennett  is  his  conviction  of  the 
sacredness  of  his  calling  as  novelist.  Not  once  nor 
twice  but  a  hundred  times  Wells  reiterates  his  gospel 
in  the  clear  notes  of  the  clarion  ;  nothing  is  so  sacred  as 


146  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

work,  nothing  matters  in  comparison  with  getting  your 
mind  clear ;  life  is  wasted  on  every  side ;  only  the 
novelist  really  lives  at  all ;  only  he  has  the  true  vision. 
Having  cut  away  the  frippery  and  foolishnesses  of  the 
myriad  things  which  pass  for  living,  he  alone  can  point 
the  way  to  where  true  happiness  and  contentment  lie 
— in  the  cultivation  of  the  scientific  spirit,  in  passion- 
ate love  and  immense  sympathy.  To  him  has  fallen 
the  wonderful  privilege  of  being  able  to  reveal  the  soul 
of  England  during  the  past  two  years  in  Mr  Britling 
Sees  It  Through,  by  far  the  ablest  novel  written 
since  1914.  That  is  Mr  Wells'  triumph— he  is  the 
supreme  clarifier  and  crystalliser.  He  writes  not  as 
Romain  Rolland,  with  the  detachment  of  a  calm 
observer  on  a  Swiss  peak,  but  with  the  passionate 
resentment  of  a  father  who  has  lost  his  only  son,  who 
was  to  remould  the  world  after  his  father's  death — it  is 
introspective  and  subjective  to  an  extraordinary  extent ; 
through  it  all  we  see  the  old  Wells  we  had  so  learnt  to 
love  and  reverence  sadly  chastened  by  a  crime  which 
was  so  exactly  to  fulfil  his  age-old  prophecies  and  put 
back  the  progress  of  the  country  for  countless  years. 

Wells  had  many  detractors  in  the  past,  but  no  one 
in  his  senses  could  dare  to  deny  that  as  a  master  in 
handling  the  English  language  and  making  it  mean 
quite  clearly  and  consistently  exactly  what  he  wishes 
to  convey  he  stands  alone ;  his  sincerity  and  honesty 
perhaps  frightened  those  who  were  afraid  of  the 
lengths  to  which  sincerity  and  honesty  could  go  in 
their  search  for  truth.  But  Wells  has  proved  his  large- 
heartedness  long  ago  in  his  splendid  sense  of  fun  ;  his 
sympathy  with  man,  in  spite  of  his  appalling  narrow- 
ness and  refusal  to  take  the  advantages  of  education,  is 
overwhelmingly  strong  and  gives  us  an  insight  into  his 
capacity  for  love. 


THE  MODERN  NOVEL  147 

Freedom  is  his  continual  cry,  freedom  from  all  this 
absurd  restraint  that  curtails  our  energies,  damps  our 
ardour  and  would  deprive  us  of  half  the  light  and  joy  of 
living.  "  Come  out,"  he  cries,  "  into  the  market-place 
and  test  life ;  better  to  fall  over  your  own  accord  in  the 
endeavour  to  learn  to  walk  than  to  be  carried  about  all 
your  life  hedged  about  with  wet-nurses." 

Arnold  Bennett  has  many  points  in  common  with 
Wells  :  his  humour  and  his  not  less  fervent  sense  of  the 
greatness  of  his  calling.  That  he  should  have  selected 
the  very  commonplace  people  of  the  ugliest  district  in 
England  is  typical  of  modern  art.  I  refer  you  again  to 
Augustus  John.  By  the  aid  of  countless  details  carefully 
correlated  he  gives  you  a  never-to-be-forgotten  picture 
of  the  effect  of  two  or  more  principal  characters  on 
one  another ;  every  trivial  domestic  incident  is  painted 
in  with  a  truth  that  almost  staggers  you.  After  read- 
ing an  Arnold  Bennett  book  you  feel  exactly  as  if  you 
had  lived  with  these  people  all  your  life;  they  are 
neither  intellectually  brilliant,  nor  pretty,  nor  any- 
thing else  except  commonplace — but  they  have  their 
passions  as  much  as  ever  the  Lady  Barbaras  of 
Galsworthy  or  the  Othellos  of  Shakespeare-  and  it  is 
their  passion  that  makes  them  interesting.  But  it  is 
neither  with  Conrad,  nor  with  Bennett,  nor  with  Wells, 
nor  with  the  women  that  I  am  principally  concerned. 
I  am  now  getting  nearer  to  the  heart  of  my  subject,  the 
younger  school  of  novelists,  and  I  have  such  a  galaxy 
of  talent  in  my  mind's  eye  that  I  scarcely  know  with 
whom  to  start.  J.  D.  Beresford  perhaps  is  the  best,  as 
he  is  an  avowed  disciple  of  Shaw.  In  his  great  trilogy 
dealing  with  the  life  history  of  Jacob  Stahl  we  see 
again  the  Wellsian  theory  of  subjectivity.  Jacob 
Stahl  is  simply  pure  autobiography.  All  Beresford's 
early  struggle  for  fame,  his  successive  stages  in  the 


148  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

conflict  of  life  to  secure  real,  lasting  love,  are  told  with 
an  honesty  of  purpose  that  almost  scares  you ;  he 
deliberately  sets  out  to  dissect  and  reveal  his  inner 
being—  there  is  no  plot,  no  climax ;  there  rarely  is  in 
the  modern  novel.  There  is  no  heightening  effect  to 
secure  a  romantic  atmosphere ;  it  is  all  realistic,  bald 
and  cold — and  yet  coM  not  with  a  moral  frigidity, 
but  cold  as  a  perfectly  executed  marble  statue  hewn  out 
by  genius  at  fever  heat  from  the  formless  block.  At 
the  end  of  three  volumes  he  has  at  last  found  happiness 
with  Betty  and  her  babies,  but  even  so  he  is  still  un- 
satisfied, he  is  still  a  candidate  for  truth.  "  Virtue  lies 
only,"  he  writes,  "  in  the  continued  renewal  of  effort ; 
the  boast  of  success  is  an  admission  of  failure."  Jacob 
Stahl  could  never  rest  content  with  any  such  attain- 
ment as  was  provided  by  the  comfort  of  his  wife's  love, 
by  the  fine,  unselfish  joy  he  finds  in  the  care  of  his  three 
children,  or,  least  of  all,  by  such  satisfactions  as  come 
to  him  from  his  modern  achievements  in  the  world  of 
letters.  He  is  ever  at  the  beginning  of  life,  reaching  out 
towards  those  eternal  values  that  are  ever  beyond  his 
grasp.  He  is  handicapped  in  many  ways  and  must 
continually  regret  his  own  ignorances  and  intellectual 
limitations,  but  he  has  not  been  threatened  by  that 
decay  of  mind  which  slowly  petrifies  and  kills  those 
who  fall  into  the  habit  of  fixed  opinions. 

"  Truly  he  who  marries  and  has  children,"  says 
Bacon,  "  gives  hostages  to  fortune,"  but  our  generation 
is  giving  the  lie  direct  to  this  seemingly  profound  asser- 
tion. The  point  that  matters  is  to  preserve  an  un- 
biased mind — "  the  fight's  the  thing."  Browning 
dimly  recognised  it  in  the  unlit  lamp  and  the  ungirt 
loin,  though  he  spoilt  his  ideal  by  that  dreadful  line  im- 
mediately following,  but  this  is  ethical  and  I  am  here  to 
discuss  the  artistic,  so  far  as  they  can  be  differentiated* 


THE  MODERN  NOVEL  149 

Beresford  is  exactly  typical  of  his  school ;  he  is  what 
we  call,  in  our  ordinary  language, "  absolutely  straight," 
and  fearless  ;  the  world  is  an  unweeded  garden,  things 
rank  and  gross  possess  it  merely.  Instead  of  acquies- 
cing in  this  quite  true  Shakespearean  remark,  instead  of 
shutting  its  eyes  to  it  as  uncomfortable  and  shocking, 
the  new  generation  forges  straight  ahead,  intent  only 
on  solution.  Now  in  the  first  place  it  is  quite  likely 
(though  I  don't  believe  this)  that  there  isn't  one ;  it 
doesn't  seem  to  me  to  matter  if  there  isn't ;  everything 
is  relative,  but  the  joy  lies  in  the  search  if  the  end  be 
but  a  chimera.  Secondly,  such  a  search  makes  for  dis- 
content and  unhappiness-  acute  unhappiness,  atoned 
for,  we  think,  by  moments  of  sheer  ecstasy  undreamt 
of  by  the  rest  of  the  world. 

It  is  this  sense  of  directness  of  aim,  in  spite  of  causing 
misery,  that  attracts  us,  in  the  first  place,  to  perhaps 
the  best  known  and  most  widely  read  of  this  school, 
Compton  Mackenzie.  I  want,  so  far  as  possible,  to 
avoid  comparison,  because  I  firmly  feel  that  out  of  my 
score  or  so  of  great  writers  ten  at  least  stand  right  out 
from  their  generation  and  deserve  to  live  so  long  as 
English  literature  is  read.  Mackenzie  may  or  may 
not  be  one  of  these  ten — he  is  certainly  not  the  leader. 

It  is  difficult  to  speak  in  cold,  critical  terms  of  a  book 
which  all  the  reviewers  (once  given  a  lead)  hailed  as  one 
of  the  masterpieces  of  our  language. 

In  the  first  place,  as  with  Meredith,  we  can  at  once 
place  our  finger  on  one  characteristic  and  praise  God  for 
Mackenzie's  intellect ;  his  novels  are  certainly  among 
the  cleverest.  But  far  more  important  than  that  is  his 
sense  of  beauty  :  not  the  pseudo- romantic,  bizarre  sort  of 
beauty  with  which  some  people  credit  him,  owing  to  his 
unfortunate  love  of  archaic  forms,  but  the  passionate 
love  of  precise,  pellucid  phrases,  and  it  is  this  sense  of 


150  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

beauty  which  enables  us  to  probe  into  the  secrets  of 
youth  and  see  a  picture  of  a  Public  School  boy's  life, 
which  is  not  merely  so  much  wasted  paper,  but  then,  of 
course,  it  is  so  frightfully  unfair  to  take  a  school  like 
St  Paul's,  situated  right  in  the  heart  of  London ;  the 
influences  that  acted  on  Michael's  life  were  mainly  from 
without  the  school.  At  Oxford  he  tries  to  give  an 
impression  of  the  callow  life  of  the  undergraduate, 
forgetful  of  the  fact  that  there  is  no  typical  Oxford  or 
typical  Cambridge.  All  that  you  can  say  of  either  is 
that  exquisite  poems  might  be  written  of  the  feet  of  the 
young  men  who  pass  so  very  quickly,  of  the  amazing 
lack  of  sympathy  they  receive  with  any  of  the  emotional 
crises  they  pass  through — in  other  words,  that  to 
each  individual  soul  the  university  means  something 
quite  different  from  what  it  means  to  everybody  else. 
And  Compton  Mackenzie  falls  into  the  same  error 
which  lesser  men  naturally  do,  of  thinking  that 
"bonners"  and  "brekkers"  and  theatre  "  rags "  and 
"  bumpers  "  matter  in  the  least. 

No;  the  secret  of  Compton  Mackenzie's  claim  to 
greatness  lies  in  this  one  single  sentence  : 

li  Soon  will  come  a  great  war  and  everybody  will  dis- 
cover it  has  come  either  because  people  are  Christians 
or  because  they  are  not  Christians.  Nobody  will  think 
it  is  because  each  man  wants  to  interfere  with  the 
conduct  of  his  neighbour." 

That  is  where  Mackenzie  comes  into  line  with  my 
argument.  In  spite  of  all  his  delving  in  the  depths  - 
and  I  am  afraid  I  hold  with  that  time-honoured  adage 
that  we  must  all  eat  our  peck  of  dirt  before  we  die — he 
has  a  clear,  sane  vision — excess  of  vice,  like  excess  of 
virtue,  is  a  crime — in  either  case  comes  the  interference 
with  the  conduct  of  one's  neighbour-  interference  not 
emanating  from  sympathy,  but  proceeding  from  that 


THE  MODERN  NOVEL  151 

police-like  vigilance  which  is  so  prominent  a  feature  of 
the  idle  and  the  obtuse. 

Sinister  Street  is  not  satisfactory  because  it  is  not 
typical  in  its  public  School  picture  nor  cannot  be  by 
the  nature  of  things  in  its  view  of  Oxford,  and  is  too 
obviously  out  to  paint  extremes  in  the  rest  of  the  book. 
Nobody  but  a  bishop  or  the  reader  of  the  Northcliffe 
feuilletons  would  believe  that  such  men  as  Meats  exist 
in  such  quantities  as  to  warrant  inclusion  in  a  work  of 
art. 

The  counter-argument,  that  the  heroes  of  the  modern 
novelists  are  not  typical,  is  quite  untrue ;  there  are  vast 
numbers  of  people  now  growing  up  who  are  dissatisfied 
with  everything,  full  of  doubts  with  regard  to  all  the 
things  which  the  last  generation  held  as  sacred.  There 
looms  before  them  an  abyss  of  unfathomable  depth,  full 
of  horrors  unless  they  are  helped  by  pictures  of  others 
in  like  case  with  themselves.  We  are  discovering  that 
life  isn't  in  the  least  what  we  thought  it  was  going  to 
be ;  everybody  fails  us  when  we  turn  for  support  except 
this  band  of  writers  who  are  themselves  suffering  and 
experiencing. 

But  I  don't  want  to  leave  Compton  Mackenzie  on 
the  result  of  one  and  that  his  worst  book. 

In  Carnival  he  showed  us  the  life  of  a  typical  modern 
girl.  Has  it  ever  struck  you  how  many  country 
solicitors'  daughters,  and  others  who  had  been  hedged 
in  and  barred  off  from  any  sane  view  of  life  as  a  whole, 
have  been  suddenly  thrown  into  violent  contact  with 
the  crudity  of  it — of  late  in  munition  factories  and 
elsewhere  ?  They  too  are  learning  from  experience,  the 
sternest  but  only  true  school  of  life.  To  what  can  they 
turn  for  support  in  an  emergency  with  any  hope  of  a 
rational  answer  to  their  questions  except  to  men  of  the 
calibre  I  am  quoting  ?     It  isn't  at  all  a  question  of 


152  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

resisting  temptation  ;  it's  solely  a  question  of  how  to 
fulfil  your  destiny  and  thereby  attain  true  nobility  of 
character.  The  fugitive  and  cloistered  virtue  no  longer 
exists;  ignorance  is  immoral,  unforgivable,  just  in  pro- 
portion as  it  is  senseless  and  needless. 

Jenny  had  to  learn  her  hard  lesson  in  the  school  of 
life,  than  which  no  lesson  can  be  harder,  to  differentiate 
between  love  and  passion,  to  uproot  the  animalism 
that  still  lurks,  cloven-footed,  in  primitive  human 
nature,  and  replace  it  by  that  divine  fervour  which 
anybody  can  attain  once  he  gives  up  the  canting,  old- 
fashioned,  effete  theories  about  sex.  Mackenzie's  high- 
water  mark  is  reached  in  his  latest  novel,  Guy  and 
Pauline,  which  is  simply  The  Statue  and  the  Bust  re- 
written : 

Where  is  the  use  of  the  lips'  red  charm. 
The  heaven  of  hair,  the  pride  of  the  brow 
And  the  blood  that  blues  the  inside  arm — 
Unless  we  turn,  as  the  soul  knows  how, 
The  earthly  gift  to  an  end  divine  ? 

That  is  the  secret  of  everything.  Here  we  have  an 
idyllic  picture  set  in  an  exquisitely  beautiful  setting  of 
two  charming  people  madly  in  love  with  each  other, 
and  watch,  with  agony  in  our  hearts,  the  gradual  diminu- 
tion of  passion,  the  gradual  realisation  on  the  part  of 
each  of  them  that  they  were  insufficient  for  each  other 
— a  book  that  might  have  saved  many  unions.  There 
is  nothing  like  it  in  the  language ;  it  is  the  epic  of 
mistaken  ideals. 

I  take  Hugh  Walpole  next  because  he  is  in  some 
degree  akin  to  Mackenzie,  not.  I  mean,  in  the  accidental 
fact  that  they  both,  like  so  many  of  the  younger  school, 
always  go  to  Cornwall  for  their  setting,  but  because  of 
that  far  more  important  feature,  their  unanimity  in 


THE  MODERN  NOVEL  153 

their  outlook  on  life.  The  whole  of  Mr  Walpole's  text 
lies  on  the  first  and  last  pages  of  Fortitude.  'Tisn't  life 
that  matters     'tis  the  courage  you  bring  to  it. 

Peter  Westcott,  imaginative,  crude,  potentially  a 
genius  possessed  of  all  the  splendours  and  terrors  which 
that  word  implies ,  suffers  abominably,  unjustly,  at  the 
hands  of  a  girl  brought  up  just  in  the  way  that  all 
these  men  so  deprecate,  the  way  of  ignorance  and 
fear,  of  convention  and  second-hand  opinions-  Peter 
thinks  that  in  her  he  will  find  that  illimitable  affection 
that  is  so  necessary  for  him.  She  fails  him.  and  he  is 
utterly  broken  temporarily.  We  leave  him  on  the 
Cornish  moor  listening  to  the  new  beatitudes  which 
are  so  pure,  so  fine,  so  intensely  typical  of  the  new  and 
glorious  England  which  is  now  in  its  birth  throes: 
Blessed  be  pain  and  torment  and  every  torture  of  the 
body.  Blessed  be  plague  and  pestilence  and  the  illness 
of  nations.  Blessed  be  all  loss  and  failure  of  friends 
and  sacrifice  of  love.  Blessed  be  the  destruction  of  all 
possessions,  the  ruin  of  all  property,  fine  cities  and  great 
palaces.  Blessed  be  the  disappointment  of  all  ambi- 
tions. Blessed  be  all  failure  and  the  ruin  of  every 
earthly  hope.  Blessed  be  all  sorrows,  torments,  hard- 
ships, endurances  that  demand  courage.  Blessed  be 
these  things— for  of  these  things  cometh  the  making  of 
a  man. 

You  see  how  they  all  hang  together  in  their  splendid 
creec[ — not  home  comforts  but  homeless  discomforts, 
not  safety  but  danger,  not  ignorance  but  experience, 
not  self-complacency  but  hideous  doubts,  not  the  pre- 
tence of  love  but  the  eternal  search  after  the  unattain- 
able :  this  is  the  gospel  of  to-day.  The  secret  lies  in 
dissatisfaction,  strife  and  energy,  the  glorious  buffeting 
and  training  of  the  soul. 

Gilbert  Caiman,  intellectually  superior  to  most  of  the 


154  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

school,  yet  comes  to  the  same  conclusion.  "  If  ever 
you  find  yourself  faced  with  a  risk,  take  it,"  concludes 
old  Mole,  after  a  life  of  torture  and  the  disillusionment 
of  experience.  There  is  a  thing  called  yesterday,  but 
that  is  only  the  dust-bin  at  the  door,  into  which  we  cast 
our  refuse,  our  failures,  our  worn-out  souls.  There  is  a 
thing  called  to-morrow,  bursting  with  far  better  things 
than  those  which  we  have  discarded.  But  into  to-day 
the  whole  passionate  force  of  the  universe  is  poured — 
and  therefore  to-day  is  marvellous. 

There  are  few  men  and  women  born  without  the 
kernel  of  passion,  but  what  do  they  do  with  it  ?  Passion 
is  looked  upon  by  our  elders — who  have  outlived  it, 
crushed  it,  controlled  it  so  well  that  it  has  vanished — 
as  something  positively  indecent — whereas  passion 
is  only  the  prelude,  the  very  necessary  prelude  to  ideal- 
ism (so  laughed  at  in  England),  to  the  belief  that  there 
is  a  wisdom  greater  than  the  wisdom  of  men.  In  its 
place  we  have  bowed  the  knee  to  the  Baal  of  hypocrisy, 
so  that  every  man's  home  becomes  a  theatre — a  care- 
fully kept  up  pretence,  everything  stunted,  soul, 
affections,  human  passions.  Now  we  come  to  an  age 
tired  of  this  amazing  puppet  show  in  the  home,  and 
what  happens  ?  What  happened  to  the  Chinese 
woman's  feet  when  unbound  ?  They  cause  her  agonies 
of  suffering,  so  that  she  cannot  walk — so  it  has  been 
with  us.  That  is  the  theme  of  "Old  Mole" — 
described  by  one  leading  reviewer  as  a  "  diverting 
study."  About  as  diverting  as  Othello.  That  is  what 
the  English  reading  public  want — diversion.  That  is 
what  I  ought  to  be  writing  a  paper  on — -'The  Modern 
English  Novel — Some  Agencies  of  Diversion,  with  Illus- 
trative Readings  from  the  works  of  Mrs  Humphry 
Ward,  Jeffery  Farnol,  John  Buchan,  Ian  Hay, 
Marjorie    Bowen,    Lucas    Malet,    Beatrice    Harraden, 


THE  MODERN  NOVEL  155 

Jessie  Pope,  Arnold  Lunn,  E.  V.  Lucas,  E.  F.  Benson, 
Gilbert  Parker  and  Agnes  and  Egerton  Castle."  It  is 
just  because,  according  to  my  theory,  the  modern  novel 
is  not  a  diversion  at  all,  but  a  new  religion,  an  essential 
factor  in  education,  a  complete  guide  to  the  art  of 
living,  that  I  trouble  to  write  a  paper  on  it  at  all — after 
which  outburst,  let  me  get  on  with  my  job. 

Mr  E.  C.  Booth  has  two  novels  to  his  credit,  The  Cliff- 
End,  now  ten  years  old,  and  Fondle,  quite  recent— 
that  place  him,  as  my  Times  reviewer  would  say,  among 
those  that  have  to  be  reckoned  with. 

It  is  slightly  divergent  from  the  school  which  I  am 
trying  to  depict,  and  owes  nothing,  so  far  as  I  can  see,  to 
any  of  them,  and  yet,  in  spite  of  its  glaring  differences, 
it  has  this  in  common :  its  main  object  is  analysis — 
analysis  of  the  soul  of  the  flighty,  lonely  daughter  of  a 
country  parson  and  of  her  steadfast  wheelwright  lover, 
Fondie.  Her  dreadful  vulgarity  and  odious  rural 
limitations  have  the  effect,  which  no  doubt  Mr  Booth 
intends  them  to  have,  of  making  us  refuse  to  rest  con- 
tent until  we  have  smashed  for  ever  a  state  of  things 
which  permits  of  a  beautiful  flower  like  this  being  be- 
smirched and  trodden  under — wasted,  in  a  word.  The 
love  of  Fondie  is  beautiful,  the  face  and  form  of  Blanche 
are  beautiful,  and  yet  both  these  things  are  wantonly 
destroyed — for  want  of  what  ?  Experience.  .  .  .  By 
reason  of  that  path  of  ignorance  on  which  I  have  been 
harping.  Blanche  is  driven  to  drown  herself ;  we  feel 
that  it  was  the  only  way ;  with  things  as  they  are  such 
ridiculous  waste  was  the  only  solution  .  .  .  but  whose 
the  fault  ?  Most  clearly  does  the  stern  answer  come  : 
Mine — yours — everyone's.  "  I  didn't  know — I  didn't 
know,"  she  cries. 

Now  at  any  rate  she  can  never  grow  old,  age  haunt 
her  with  no  terrors,  Respectability  never  claim  her  as  her 


156  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

rightful  prey,  writing  upon  her  face  the  careworn  lines 
and  characters  with  which  she  signalises  her  elect.  God's 
justice  is  greater  than  man's  justice,  God's  wisdom  than 
man's  wisdom,  God's  love  than  man's  love,  and  God's 
forgiveness  than  man's.  Yet  Fondie,  in  spite  of  all, 
forgave  all,  loving  her  so  much.  We  may  leave  it  with 
the  Infinite  to  love  and  forgive  more  than  man,  with 
all  his  limitations  and  narrow  codes.  So  runs  the 
indictment ;  the  story  is  commonplace,  ordinary — to 
be  seen  every  day  in  the  news  columns  and  in  the  serial 
columns  of  every  halfpenny  paper. 

It  is  the  attitude  with  which  the  author  regards  the 
story,  the  beauty  of  his  nature  expressed  in  the  beauty 
of  his  language  that  makes  us  include  him  in  the  list  of 
those  who  matter.  Such  things  are,  such  things  ought 
not  to  be.  In  common  with  the  rest  of  his  contem- 
poraries, he  does  not  write  merely  to  interest  by  narra- 
tive, as  the  eighteenth-century  novelists  did,  but  to  drive 
a  message  home.  These  novels  are  all  lay  sermons— 
well,  why  not  ?  I  refuse  to  submit  to  the  absurd  dictum 
that  art  is  self-sufficing  and  serves  no  useful  purpose — 
all  that  nonsense  about  "  beating  beautiful  ineffectual 
wings,"  and  so  on.  The  finest  art  is  just  the  finest 
sermon  in  the  world. 

Mr  St  John  Lucas  brings  us  back  to  the  main  body 
again  :  we  can  leave  Mr  Booth  safely  guarding  our 
flank.  In  The  First  Round,  published  seven  years  ago, 
and  its  sequel,  April  Folly,  we  reach,  perhaps,  the 
high- water  mark  of  the  school. 

In  the  first  place,  though  this  is  partially  irrelevant, 
The  First  Bound  contains  the  finest  picture  of  Public 
School  life  as  it  really  is  that  has  ever  been  printed. 
I  know  that  Mr  Walpole,  in  Mr  Perrin  and  Mr  Traill, 
did  for  a  certain  sort  of  school  what  Compton 
Mackenzie  did  for  a  certain  sort  of  man — both  these 


THE  MODERN  NOVEL  157 

things  may  have  been  necessary.  Personally,  I  think 
Mr  Walpole's  novel  was  necessary,  but  the  true 
artist  gives  us  the  typical,  and  the  school  depicted 
in  The  First  Round  might  equally  well  be  Sherborne, 
Winchester,  Wellington,  Uppingham  or  Shrewsbury. 
It  is  the  life  story  of  a  boy  with  the  aesthetic  faculties 
well  developed ;  he  has  the  makings  of  a  great 
musician.  Now  there  are  more  of  these  types — types 
that  are  supra-normal — than  are  commonly  allowed 
for,  and  they  suffer  indescribable  torture  wherever 
they  are.  Denis  Yorke's  first  round  in  the  battle 
of  life  is  an  extremely  severe  one,  and  he  comes 
out  of  it  just  as  Peter  Westcott  in  Mr  Walpole's 
book — cleaner,  saner,  truer  to  the  ideal.  Sympathy 
and  forgetfulness  of  self  —  this  was  the  answer  to 
the  riddle  of  life,  the  magic  talisman  that  made 
existence  beautiful  in  the  darkest  places,  the  great 
compensation  for  all  the  poverty  and  suffering  and 
injustice  in  the  world.  The  path  was  now  plain.  A 
belief  in  others — this  was  the  true  path,  not  coldly 
isolated,  as  he  had  thought,  but  full  of  hosts  of  other 
pilgrims,  on  a  journey  where  Love  himself  forbade  that 
even  the  vilest  should  fall  by  the  wayside  for  lack  of 
succour  from  his  comrades.  In  the  sequel  we  see 
where  this  theory  lands  him.  One  of  his  pupils  (he  be- 
comes a  teacher  of  music)  falls  madly  in  love  with  him, 
and  he  is  at  present  deceived  into  thinking  that  he  loves 
her.  .  .  .  When  he  finds  out,  nothing  will  alter  him 
from  his  determination  to  carry  it  through,  but  she 
finds  out  and  leaves  him.  They  meet  years  afterwards 
— an  anticlimax,  of  course,  like  everything  in  life — a 
miserable  conversation  follows,  and  they  separate  again. 
An  old  man  who  has  watched  the  meeting  accosts  the 
hero,  and  leaves  him  with  this  advice.  "  I've  seen  the 
world,"  he  said.     "  I  know  life.     Take  an  old  man's 


158  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

advice  and  never  do  that — never  hurt  a  woman. 
Women,  women  give  us  everything,  love  and  adoration 
and  pity,  and  then  we  don't  know  how  to  treat  them, 
and  they  go  away  crying.  They  lay  their  hearts  in  the 
road  and  we  trample  on  them.  Never  do  that,  young 
sir,  never  do  that." 

The  irony  of  it — the  same  old  lesson — the  same 
causes,  the  same  effect,  misunderstanding,  misery, 
neglect  all  through  the  one  agency — ignorance.  "  He 
didn't  know — he  didn't  know." 

You  must  think  that  I  have  been  appallingly  serious, 
that  after  all,  as  the  philosopher  says,  "  Nothing  matters 
half  so  much  as  we  think  it  does."  On  the  other  hand, 
though,  I  grant  you  that  at  once  it  is  equally  true  that 
everything  matters  a  great  deal  more  than  we  think  it 
does. 

There  is  light-hearted,  full-blooded  humour  in  every 
single  one  of  these  novels  (with  the  exception,  perhaps, 
of  Conrad's)  :  without  it  half  the  philosophy  would 
be  lost.  These  young  men  do  not  take  themselves 
quite  so  seriously  as  I  have  perhaps  led  you  to 
think,  but  I  have  only  just  time  to  touch  upon  the 
really  salient  features.  I  dare  not  pretend  to  offer 
you  anything  like  a  complete  picture  of  (for  instance) 
the  sympathy  with  which  they  draw  the  very  people 
who  are  the  prime  movers  of  all  the  evil  the  parents, 
the  schoolmasters,  the  parochial-minded  advisers  of 
their  youth.  They  are  all  treated  with  a  quite  astonish- 
ing courtesy,  their  good  points  given  full  play  ;  and 
they  have,  of  course,  any  number  of  good  qualities. 
They  have  their  awful  tragedies  too  ;  the  only  thing  is 
that  they  are  mercifully  saved  by  their  very  blindness 
from  ever  realising  them  to  the  full  extent. 

Had  I  time  I  would  press  home  the  need  for  reading 
the    humorists   pure  and   simple,   the  inimitable   Mr 


THE  MODERN  NOVEL  159 

Munro,  Stephen  Leacock,  E.  V.  Lucas,  James  Stephens, 
G.  K.  Chesterton  (who  has,  of  course,  as  much  of  a 
serious  axe  to  grind  as  any  of  them),  and  so  on  :  they 
are  as  essential  to  our  complete  digestion  and  aesthetic 
enjoyment  as  hors  d'ceuvre,  or  sweets  or  succulent  entree, 
but  they  do  not  contain  the  body  of  the  meal.  I  am 
constrained  to  dwell  only  on  the  soul-satisfying  meat 
course — and  your  objection,  every  man's  objection,  to 
meat  is  that  it  contains  blood.  Vegetarians  and  other 
anaemic  people  (I  am  striving  not  to  be  unfair)  hate  the 
thought  of  thinking  of  what  I  must,  for  hurry's  sake, 
call  the  realistic,  naturalistic  school  of  meat.  I  am 
concluding  on  a  general  note. 

The  realists,  I  reiterate,  do  not  dwell  on  the  sordid  side 
of  life  out  of  a  love  of  the  sordid,  nor  on  the  ugly  because 
they  prefer  ugliness  to  the  beautiful.  "  We  do  not,"  in 
George  Moore's  words,  "  always  choose  what  you  call 
unpleasant  subjects,  but  we  do  try  to  get  at  the  roots  of 
things  :  and  the  basis  of  life  being  material,  the  analyst 
sooner  or  later  finds  himself  invariably  handling  what 
this  sentimental  age  calls  coarse  .  .  .  the  novel  if  it  be 
anything  is  contemporary  history  [I  refer  you  to  Dead 
Yesterday  and  Mr  Britling  for  confirmation  of  this],  an 
exact  and  complete  reproduction  of  the  social  surround- 
ings of  the  age  we  live  in. 

'4  Seen  from  afar  all  things  in  nature  are  of  equal 
worth  and  the  meanest  things  when  viewed  with  the 
eyes  of  God  are  raised  to  heights  of  tragic  awe  which 
conventionality  would  limit  to  the  deaths  of  kings  and 
patriots." 

It  is  rubbish  to  suppose  that  the  Realists  adopted 
the  idea  of  unhappy  endings  because  they  loved 
them;  like  Shakespeare,  they  observed  that  certain 
causes  produce  certain  effects,  and  they  refused 
to  shut  their  eyes  to  a  fact  which  the  whole  world 


160  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

already  knows.  Conversely,  or  rather  hence,  neutral 
endings  predominate  in  this  school  of  writing  because 
they  also — notoriously — predominate  in  real  life.  But 
all  this  talk  of  unhappiness  does  not  detract  from 
beauty  ;  such  an  argument  is  only  an  illustration  of  the 
terrible  way  in  which  our  minds  get  confused.  Rather 
have  the  Realists  discovered  a  new  beauty  in  things,  the 
loveliness  that  lies  in  obscure  places,  the  splendour  of 
sordidness,  humility  and  pain.  They  have  taught  us 
that  beauty,  like  the  Holy  Spirit,  blows  where  it  lists — 
no  true  Realist  but  is  an  Idealist  too. 


VI 
MODERN   DRAMA 

TWO  totally  different  factors  have  led  me  to 
try  to  elucidate  exactly  whither  we  are  tending 
in  our  stagecraft  at  the  present  time :  (1)  the 
hubbub  caused  by  certain  generals  and  bishops  who 
see  in  "revue"  nothing  but  '' suggest  iveness  "  and 
a  vicious  lure ;  and  (2)  the  amazingly  brilliant  critical 
work  of  the  late  Mr  Dixon  Scott,  published  recently 
under  the  title  of  Men  of  Letters, 

With  regard  to  the  theatre  of  to-day  the  most  obvious 
criticism  to  make  is  that  out  of  all  the  thirty  or  so 
plays  now  running  in  London,  every  one  of  which  draws 
a  full  house  every  night,  only  two  are  by  men  oi  re- 
cognised standing  in  the  dramatic  world,  and  one  of 
these  is  a  revival.  And  yet  only  three  years  ago  our 
most  enlightened  and  unbiased  historians  were  stat- 
ing quite  definitely  that  the  novel  had  had  its  day  and 
was  immediately  to  be  supplanted  by  a  literary  revival 
in  drama  which  should  astonish  the  world.  The 
machine-made  plays  of  Labriche  and  Sardou  had  been 
ousted  by  the  freer,  more  naturalistic  school  of  Ibsen. 
The  stage  had  become  a  platform  for  the  discussion  of 
all  the  intricate  problems  of  modern  life,  the  emancipa- 
tion of  women,  the  crime  of  poverty,  false  romanticism, 
Home  Rule,  the  struggle  between  labour  and  capital, 
the  evils  that  arose  from  all  forms  of  stereotyped  con- 
ventions, and  so  on.  Most  of  the  leading  geniuses  of  our 
time  had  contributed  their  quota  to  these  polemical 
discourses,  nearly  always  with  brilliance,  if  not  with  an 
altogether  satisfactory  knowledge  of  craftsmanship  and 
l  161 


162  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

technique.  There  were  also  meteoric  flights  of  poetic 
geniuses  who  neither  followed  nor  founded  any  school, 
but  flashed  brilliantly  for  an  hour  and  then  swept  by. 

Then  the  war  came,  and  with  it  the  cessation  of  all 
serious  drama.  All  domestic  problems  vanished  before 
the  one  great,  overwhelming  one  of  coping  with  the 
enemy,  and  this  was  scarcely  one  to  brook  being  dis- 
cussed on  the  boards.  Moreover,  there  was  no  argu- 
ment ;  the  maximum  output  of  energy  directed  into 
its  best  channels  was  the  only  theme  of  the  ardent 
patriots.  The  nerves  of  the  nation  became  tense,  its 
muscles  taut ;  we  all  went  into  training.  The  result 
was  that  we  temporarily  lost  sight  of  art  or  its  uses. 
Relaxation  we  understood  to  be  necessary  for  all  of  us, 
else  why  should  soldiers  ever  be  granted  leave  ?  The 
point  was :  What  sort  of  relaxation  was  best  for  the 
fighter  and  worker  ?  We  were  not  long  left  in  doubt. 
America  stepped  into  the  breach  left  by  the  legitimate 
drama's  decease  and  charmed  us  with  "  revue." 
Musical  comedy  maintained  a  rather  precarious  hold 
on  its  conservative  lovers,  comedy  and  tragedy  proper 
died,  the  music-halls,  in  order  to  save  their  lives,  were 
compelled  to  abandon  isolated  "turns  "  for  this  new 
craze,  and  as  a  result  we  have  now  the  choice  between 
"  revue  "  and  .  .  .  nothing. 

Men  back  from  the  front  were  supplied  with  the 
dishes  for  which  their  souls  ached  :  lightness,  prettiness, 
merriment,  catchy  songs,  colour,  youth,  and,  in  modera- 
tion (because  of  its  exceeding  rarity),  beauty.  They 
found  it  possible  to  forget  all  the  mud  and  blood,  the 
horror  of  separation  and  death  ;  for  three  hours  they 
could  laugh  whole-heartedly,  lose  themselves  in  delight 
and  carry  away  impressions  of  gaiety  which  would 
buoy  them  up  in  the  dark  moments  which  threatened 
their  future. 


MODERN  DRAMA  168 

Suddenly  a  warning  voice  sounded :  the  voice  oi  a 
man  whom  all  Englishmen  respect ;  a  second  followed  ; 
a  third  .  .  .  and  half  the  nation  began  to  repeat  the 
admonition.  "These  'revues'  are  vulgar,  naughty, 
even  vicious ;  they  lead  men  on  to  active  evil  ;  they 
affect  our  morals  ;  we  are  becoming  as  a  result  loose, 
decadent,  foul-minded."  It  was  an  astonishing 
thought.  Most  of  us  in  our  heart  of  hearts  had  deplored 
the  decay  of  all  serious  plays,  but  it  was  easy  to  under- 
stand that  a  man  back  from  the  front  would  not  wish 
to  be  wearied  with  the  domestic  problems  of  Poor  Law 
and  housing  abuses  ;  on  the  other  hand,  we  had  heard 
so  much  of  the  renaissance  of  a  poetic  spirit  in  the 
trenches  that  we  thought  that  some  genius  might  have 
produced  a  literary  drama  to  satisfy  the  craving  for 
beauty  which  wre  all  confess  to.  But  it  had  never 
struck  us  that  these  gossamer-like,  inconsequent, 
jovial  "  revues  "  were  active  agents  of  the  devil :  we 
had  taken  them  as  narcotics.  That  they  were  fre- 
quently dull,  rarely  as  witty  as  we  could  have  wished, 
with  no  definite  point,  we  knew  ;  so  were  many  sermons, 
but  we  did  not  stigmatise  sermons  as  immoral  on  that 
account ;  that  many  of  the  girls  were  pretty  and 
vivacious  we  hoped,  but  did  not  always  find,  but  surely 
it  was  possible  to  like  prettiness  and  youthful  charm 
without  debasing  that  liking  into  something  worse. 
Frankly,  we  looked  in  vain  for  those  demoralising 
features  which  were  said  to  be  the  ruin  of  our  man- 
hood. The  jokes,  such  as  they  were,  seemed  to  be  in 
much  better  taste  than  those  current  in  the  music- 
halls  and  musical  comedies  of  five  years  ago ;  they 
were  also  a  trifle  less  dull ;  once  or  twice  they  almost 
approached  the  subtle  .  .  .  but  you  don't  want 
subtlety  in  a  narcotic.  You  require  no  stimulus  to 
the  intellect,  rather  is  the  object  to  soothe  it,  to  send  your 


164  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

thinking  powers  to  sleep.  That  object  the  creators 
oi'  "  revue  "  seem  to  me  to  have  produced. 

I  am  amazed  at  the  hue  and  cry  raised  at  present 
against  these  so  necessary  amusements,  but  it  does 
indirectly  raise  the  question  of  serious  acting. 

Surely  there  must  by  now  be  many  people  who  are 
tired  of  an  interminable  round  of  "  telephone-scenes," 
of  the  effect  (once  so  bizarre  and  delectable)  of  play- 
ing the  "  revue "  backwards,  of  jingling,  meaningless 
rhymes,  and  songs  that  drive  you  desperate  with  their 
thinness  of  melody  and  lack  of  originality  in  theme. 

It  is  time  a  new  dramatist  arose  to  carry  on  the  high 
traditions  of  1913,  to  give  us  fresh  ideas  and  nobler 
ideals,  to  amuse  us,  not  by  buffoonery,  but  by  subtlety 
and  charm,  to  ensnare  us  artistically.  We  do  not  want 
merely  the  revival  of  Shakesjoeare  and  Sheridan,  we 
want  a  fresh  impetus  in  the  world  of  drama  as  we  have 
in  the  sphere  of  poetry  and  painting,  fiction  and  music. 
Why  is  it  that  the  theatre  alone  has  played  us  false 
in  this  crisis  ?  In  the  face  of  incredible  difficulties, 
artists  and  musicians  have  kept  the  flame  of  beauty 
alive  in  our  hearts  ;  it  is  time  beauty  returned  to  the 
stage.  At  the  present  day  most  thinking  men  and 
women  seek  pleasure  anywhere  but  in  the  theatre : 
the  galleries  are  crowded,  the  concert-halls  better 
attended  than  ever  before.  The  only  reason  why  the 
"  revues "  are  full  is  because  everyone  necessarily 
gravitates  in  war-time  to  London.  The  country  is 
unbearable  ;  we  tend  to  become  introspective,  which 
spells  madness  in  these  days.  Being  in  London,  we 
naturally  attend  its  theatres  .  .  .  consequently  money 
is  pouring  into  the  laps  of  the  managers  and  proprietors. 
But  if  only  a  little  courage  could  be  cultivated  by  these 
most  conservative  purveyors  of  amusement  1  think  that 
they  would  find  that  Brighouse  and  Barrie  are  not  the 


MODERN  DRAMA  165 

only  serious  playwrights  who  are  able  to  command  our 
attention.  Where  are  Granville  Barker,  Shaw,  Arnold 
Bennett,  Masefield  and  Chesterton  ? — to  mention  the 
most  obvious  quintette. 

Do  the  theatre  owners  really  think,  because  there  is  a 
war  on,  that  we  are  unable  to  appreciate  the  artistry 
of  such  plays  as  The  Madras  House,  Nan,  Magic,  The 
Great  Adventure,  or  How  He  Lied  to  Her  Husband  ? 
It  has  already  been  proved  that  we  cannot  tolerate 
melodramatic  rubbish  like  The  Hawk.  We  are  much 
more  critical,  much  more  alert  than  we  used  to  be,  as  a 
natural  consequence  of  our  quadrupled  energy.  We  do 
not  want  eternal  narcotics  as  our  refection  ;  after  a 
time  they  cease  to  take  effect.  A  change  of  environment, 
not  mere  blankness,  is  the  best  refreshment  for  the 
body  and  brain,  the  jaded  munitioneer  or  the  wounded 
warrior.  It  is  just  as  much  a  national  service  for  our 
great  playwrights  to  exert  their  powers  on  our  behalf 
as  it  is  for  those  of  us  whose  lot  lies  in  more  mundane 
duties  to  do  what  we  best  can  for  the  cause  to  which 
we  are  pledged.  Who  then  are  the  men  we  look  to  to 
come  forward  and  "  cleanse  our  stage,"  and  what  is  it 
that  we  expect  from  them  ? 

It  is  at  this  point  that  I  would  introduce  Mr  Dixon 
Scott's  critical  essays  to  the  notice  of  those  unfortunates 
who  are  as  yet  unfamiliar  with  them. 

Many  critics,  particularly  Mr  Chesterton,  have  written 
brilliant  expositions  of  the  work  of  Bernard  Shaw,  but 
no  one  has  got  so  close  to  the  heart  of  the  matter  as 
Mr  Dixon  Scott.  To  find  out  exactly  what  Shaw  has 
done  for  the  stage  we  have  to  go  back  some  years,  to 
the  days,  in  fact,  when  he  set  out,  Quixote-like,  to  make 
the  theatre  "  a  factory  of  thought,  a  prompter  of  con- 
science, an  elucidator  of  conduct,  an  armoury  against 
despair  and  dullness,  and  a  temple  of  the  Ascent  of 


166  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

Man "...  all  this  simply  because  he  happened  to 
be  dramatic  critic  of  The  Saturday  Review,  for,  as  Mr 
Dixon  Scott  has  pointed  out.  Shaw's  besetting  weakness 
is  a  certain  stubborn  pride  of  soul  which  cannot  permit 
him  to  admit,  even  in  a  whisper  to  himself,  that  the 
cause  he  is  engaged  in  is  not  crucial.  As  Rodin  has 
said,  susceptible  to  impressions  like  all  artists  and  a 
philosopher  at  the  same  time  Shaw  cannot  do  other- 
wise than  deceive  himself.  At  any  rate  by  1898  he 
had  deceived  himself  into  thinking  that  the  drama  was 
his  special  mission.  Now  in  the  first  place  he  lacked 
the  prime  essential  of  all  dramatists,  the  quality  of  an 
imaginative  sympathy  :  the  quality  of  just  watching 
with  ever-growing  delight  the  doings  of  every  sort  and 
size  of  people  ;  no  one  could  be  less  fitted  than  he  was 
to  give  the  public  the  sort  of  play  that  they  ought  to 
have  had.  He  was  intolerant  of  his  audience's  stupidity 
and  viciousness,  "  part  of  them  nine-tenths  chapel- 
goers  by  temperament,  and  the  remainder  ten-tenths 
blackguards."  His  earl y  training  in  socialism  had 
made  him  unsociable,  and  a  moment's  thought  will 
convince  us  of  the  limitations  of  a  playwright  who 
wantonly  narrows  his  range  because  of  his  misunder- 
standing of  and  contempt  for  the  people. 

Secondly,  the  very  brilliance  of  his  diction,  terse,  in- 
tellectually incisive,  keen  and  crisp  as  it  had  become  by 
years  of  practice,  necessarily  cut  him  adrift  from  more 
than  nine-tenths  of  his  fellow-men.  He  could  only 
write  definite  dialogue,  so  all  his  characters  have  to  be 
men  and  women  of  quite  definite  convictions.  All  the 
dramatis  personam  seem  to  belong  to  one  exclusive  caste. 
Thirdly,  this  exclusiveness  made  him  innocently  accept 
what  was  then  known  as  the  "New  Woman"  (how 
grotesque  and  old-fashioned  she  seems  to-day)  as  woman. 
The  amazing  thing  is  that  in  spite  of  these  limitations — 


MODERN  DRAMA  107 

and  it  is  imperative  that  we  should  grasp  what  they  mean 
— Shaw's  plays  do  remain  the  most  tonic  of  our  time. 
Behind  it  all  he  is  actuated  by  a  passion  for  purity, 
gentleness,  truth,  justice  and  beauty ;  once  you 
realise  this,  and  regard  these  plays  with  the  sympathy 
they  doggedly  deride  then  you  will  receive  the  help 
which  they  hunger  to  offer.  Such  is  Mr  Dixon  Scott's 
solution  of  the  vexed  question  of  Shavian  drama,  and 
it  is,  I  think,  a  fairly  conclusive  one.  Is  there  no  room 
for  these  intellectual  fireworks  to-day  ?  Surely  there 
must  be  thousands  of  tired  men  and  women  who  would 
revel  in  a  revival  of  Fanny's  First  Play  or  Candida  even 
if  Shaw  could  not  be  induced  to  write  on  some  fresh 
topic.  Shaw  on  Local  Tribunals,  on  the  American 
Invasion  of  the  Stage,  on  the  New  Army,  the  New 
Woman,  the  Rich  Munition  Worker  would  be  richly 
humorous,  delightfully  irritating.  It  is  not  necessary 
to  believe  in  Shaw's  creed  to  enjoy  his  plays  ;  to  take 
them  too  seriously  is  to  lose  half  the  fun,  but  to  allow  a 
whole  winter  season  to  run  without  giving  him  a  chance 
of  standing  on  his  head  is  to  deprive  ourselves  of 
one  of  the  most  mirth-provoking  and  intellectually 
stimulating  treats  imaginable. 

For  those  who  refuse  to  see  the  amusing  side  of 
Shaw's  polemical  discourses  on  strikes  and  morals  I 
would  suggest  that  a  revival  of  Oscar  Wilde's  artificial 
comedies  should  be  tried.  There  at  any  rate  will  be 
no  talk  of  the  poor  man's  rights,  for  the  simple  reason 
that  there  are  no  poor  in  his  world.  There  is  Jermyn 
Street,  Piccadilly,  Half -Moon  Street,  just  as  there  used 
to  be  Bath  and  Vauxhall  Gardens.  There  are  no 
problems  of  poverty  any  more  than  there  are  problems 
of  morals.  There  is  just  artistry,  delicacy  and  the 
beauty  of  a  hothouse  plant,  and  with  it  silvery  laughter, 
quiet  and  self-complacent :    not  at  all  a  bad   recipe 


168  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

for  those  who  wish  to  forget  the  pain  and  lies  that 
await  them  outside  the  theatre.  It  is  no  question  of 
holding  the  mirror  up  to  nature  either  with  Shaw  or 
Wilde  any  more  than  it  was  with  Congreve  and  his 
fellow  Restoration  dramatists.  It  is,  we  may  say  with 
R.  L.  Stevenson,  with  the  object  of  escaping  from  life 
that  we  turn  to  books  or  the  stage  to-day.  No  one 
wants  to  see  our  actual  conflict  with  the  powers  of 
evil  depicted  on  the  London  stage.  We  want  to  be 
amused :  why  not  permit  society's  licensed  jesters  of 
the  last  two  decades  to  come  and  cut  their  capers  before 
us  once  again  ?  Age  cannot  wither  nor  custom  stale 
their  artificial  humour. 

Again,  what  has  happened  to  the  Irish  players  ? 
Only  a  few  years  ago  we  were  all  agog  with  enthusiasm 
over  the  "Celtic  Revival,"  with  the  sparkling,  astringent, 
tonic  qualities  of  Synge  and  his  compatriots,  Yeats, 
Lady  Gregory,  St  John  Irvine,  Rutherford  Mayne, 
Lennox  Robinson  and  the  rest  of  them. 

Certainly  we  find  a  different  school  of  thought 
catered  for  again  here.  There  is  no  question  of  chang- 
ing the  world.  Synge  writes  down  in  a  musical, 
rhythmical  prose  that  has  never  been  equalled  before 
nor  since  exactly  what  he  heard  and  saw  in  those  remote 
islands  off  the  west  of  Ireland.  Is  there  no  room  to-day 
for  such  a  play  as  The  Well  of  the  Saints,  with  its  central 
motif  of  the  tragedy  of  fulfilled  desire ;  do  we  no 
longer  care  to  witness  artistic  representations  of  world- 
truths  ?  To  judge  from  letters  and  articles  in  the  Press, 
we  are  only  just  beginning  to  be  alive  to  them  :  why 
then  banish  them  from  the  stage  ?  Do  our  theatrical 
managers  really  believe  that  a  revival  of  The  Playboy 
of  the  Western  World  would  involve  financial  loss  ? 
Why,  there  never  was  a  time  when  men  and  women 
were  so   interested    in  the  development  of   the   soul 


MODERN  DRAMA  169 

within  us.  War  has  made  many  of  us  "  likely  gaffers 
in  the  end  of  all "  who  might  otherwise  have  been  content 
to  crawl  from  cradle  to  grave  feckless,  blind,  un- 
ambitious and  useless  as  Christy  Mahon  was  before 
Pegeen  Mike  (the  prototype  of  war)  awoke  in  him  self- 
confidence  and  the  thousand  latent  talents  which  were 
to  make  a  man  of  him.  There  is  no  sermonising  here, 
but  only  a  vast  imaginative  sympathy,  a  telling  sense 
of  dramatic  values  and  the  haunting  melody  of  a  patois 
lew  of  us  had  ever  appreciated  before.  There  was, 
moreover,  acting  of  a  kind  we  had  never  seen  in  England ; 
these  Irish  players  appeared  merely  to  be  living  their 
ordinary  lives  and  we  privileged  to  look  through  the 
windows  of  their  cottages  as  they  went  about  their 
business,  ignorant  of  our  presence. 

No  wonder  the  best  critics  became  optimistic  and 
prophesied  a  brave  future  for  the  drama  .  .  .  but  why 
have  war's  alarms  driven  them  from  our  midst  ?  We 
need  them  now  more  than  ever  we  did. 

Why  did  the  repertory  system  make  such  headway 
in  Dublin,  Glasgow,  Birmingham,  Manchester  and 
Bristol  and  fail  ignominiously  in  London  ?  There  can  be 
no  doubt  that  salvation  lies  in  this  system  and  in  this 
alone.  .  .  .  Such  a  play  as  Mr  Chesterton's  Magic 
has  a  perennial  charm.  It  can  no  more  grow  stale 
than  Max  Beerbohm's  cartoons  or  Henry  James's 
novels  can.  It  is  for  all  time.  That  being  so,  there  is 
no  need  to  put  it  on  for  two  hundred  nights  and  then 
consign  it  to  oblivion  as  is  done  with  the  majority  of 
long-run  plays,  the  machine-made  melodrama,  the 
treacly  sentimental  comedy,  the  vacuous  musical  (!) 
farce  or  the  pageant-play.  In  common  with  the  works 
of  other  geniuses  which  deal  with  beauty  and  the  eternal 
verities  it  ought  to  take  its  turn  for  a  fortnight,  say, 
sandwiched  between  Strife  and  The  Tragedy  of  Nan, 


170  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

then  be  given  a  rest  and  produced  again  in  three  or 
four  months.  It  is  just  such  a  fantasy  as  will  whirl 
you  away  into  a  wonderland  of  pure  mirth  mingled 
with  real  pathos,  where  shrewdness  and  intellect  are 
not  blunted  but  rather  exhilarated  and  sharpened.  It 
leaves  you  thinking,  as  you  come  out,  over  the  many 
suggestions,  the  flashes  of  insight  into  the  meaning  of 
life  which  encrust  the  play  like  so  many  rich  jewels. 
It  has  the  gift,  which  is  almost  the  criterion  of  every 
good  play,  of  not  leaving  you  where  it  found  you.  You 
have  advanced  yet  another  rung  on  the  difficult  ladder 
of  life. 

All  these  men  fulfil  Synge's  dictum  that  "on  the 
stage  one  must  have  reality,  and  one  must  have  joy." 
Mr  Granville  Barker,  the  pierrot  on  pilgrimage,  is  the 
next  playwright  on  whom  the  critical  genius  of  Mr 
Dixon  Scott  alights  :  of  his  plays  he  picks  out  The 
Madras  House  as  the  high- water  mark  of  his  genius. 
"  Here  we  have,"  says  Mr  Scott,  "  a  beautiful  loyalty  to 
life,  an  exquisitely  natural  unfurling  and  effoliation  of 
character  and  motive,  undeflected  by  an  arbitrary 
concejDt  or  merely  intellectual  creed  ;  a  deliciously  fluent 
pose,  balance,  grace  of  construction  and  design  ;  beauty 
comes  flying  back  to  this  play,  a  glittering  invader, 
gloriously  flushing  and  confirming  all  its  action."  In 
eighteen  years  Mr  Barker  has  written  only  four  plays, 
but  each  of  these  belongs  to  the  imperishable  type  which 
will  long  outlast  the  generation  for  whom  they  were 
written  ;  for  eighteen  years  he  has  been  laboriously, 
slowly  cutting  letters  out  afresh,  in  order  that  he  can 
see  and  use  the  virgin  ore  beneath  our  phrases,  fighting 
down  to  something  dense  as  metal,  as  enduring  as  a 
marble  pavement  underneath,  economical  as  a  cable- 
gram and  yet  with  a  charm,  grace  and  elegance,  a 
silvery  slenderness.  a  quivering  "life"  like  the  spring 


MODERN  DRAMA  171 

of  a  sword-blade  ;  by  a  magic  of  fusion,  the  incom- 
patible qualities  of  curtness  and  charm  are  made  one. 
The  Marrying  of  Ann  Leete,  Mr  Dixon  Scott  calls  our 
one  genuine  modern  tragedy  of  manners.  Mr  Granville 
Barker  has  been  frequently  bracketed  with  Shaw  by 
undiscerning  critics,  whereas  the  truth  lies  in  the  fact 
that  they  are  totally  opposed.  Shaw,  convinced  that 
he  has  the  truth  in  his  pocket,  flings  it  in  our  faces  with 
contempt,  while  Mr  Barker  watches  us  ordinary 
mortals  with  a  wistful  wonder,  like  a  wondering  pierrot 
searching  for  the  truth,  prefacing  every  statement  with 
a  tentative,  whimsical  "perhaps." 

Mr  Barker  sets  his  characters  free  in  his  mimic, 
magic  world,  whence  all  accidentals  have  been  banished, 
wThere  they  can  move  and  change  and  respond  without 
any  interference,  and  lets  them  evolve  there  as  they 
will  (none  of  Shaw's  creatures  ever  evolve  !),  trusting 
the  spark  of  vitality  with  which,  as  a  creator,  he  has 
endowed  them  to  guide  them  in  accordance  with  the 
final  laws  of  life  ;  as  Philip  says  at  the  close  of  The 
Madras  House:  "Male  and  female  created  He  them 
.  .  .  and  left  us  to  do  the  rest.  Men  and  women  are  a 
long  time  in  the  making,  aren't  they  ?  " 

This  is  miles  in  advance  of  the  Shavian  code  of  ethics. 
There  is  a  quietness  about  Barker  which  is  quite  foreign 
to  Shaw,  a  breadth  of  vision  which  we  should  welcome 
with  open  arms  on  the  stage  to-day  if  only  we  were 
permitted  to  witness  it. 

Harold  Brighouse  alone  of  the  Mancunian  school  has 
a  play  now  running.  But  what  of  his  far  greater  con- 
temporary and  friend,  Stanley  Houghton  ?  I  am  not 
pretending  that  The  Younger  Generation  and  Hindle 
Wakes  show  us  Houghton  working  in  his  true  medium  ; 
he  was  cut  off  before  he  really  found  himself.  Mr 
Dixon  Scott  is  probably  correct  in  his  inference  that 


172  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

another  five  years  would  have  seen  the  dramatist  as  a 
successful  writer  of  fiction.  The  immediate  point  at 
issue  is  that  there  was  much  in  his  plays  which  we 
deplore  the  want  of  to-day.  He  may  have  been  imita- 
tive :  we  can  smell  Shaw,  Wilde,  Hankin,  Bennett, 
and  even  Synge  in  most  of  his  work,  but  he  wrested 
from  these  a  sense  of  witty  and  crisp  dialogue  which  is 
altogether  dead  now. 

In  his  plays  he  may,  as  Mr  Brighouse  asserts,  have 
observed  life  from  the  comic  writer's  point  of  view, 
which  is  not  the  poet's.  For  his  art,  not  the  beauty  of 
life,  but  the  absurdities  and  hypocrisies  of  daily  exist- 
ence., were  the  targets  of  his  aim.  Even  so  Ave  may  be 
duly  grateful  for  such  a  manifestation  of  the  Comic 
Spirit,  for  she  is  woefully  lacking  in  the  theatre  to-day. 
Hindle  Wakes  and  The  Younger  Generation  did  at  least 
bring  reality  back  to  the  stage,  and  also  joy  :  they 
woke  us  up  to  the  fact  that  "  even  in  the  North  "  (so 
provincial  are  Ave  Southrons !)  things  are  moving ; 
the  youth  of  the  age  Avas  knocking  at  the  door  and 
demanding  a  right  to  live  its  oavii  life  in  its  own  way. 
Mr  Dixon  Scott  is  hardly  just  to  Houghton  ;  he  is  too 
keen  to  prove  that  heAAras  a  dramatist  by  force  of  circum- 
stances, a  novelist  by  instinct ;  he  forgets  that  even  in 
the  little  that  Ave  possess  of  his  dramatic  work  he  shows 
an  insight  into  character,  a  sense  of  "  situation,"  and 
an  amazing  shrewdness  which  are  just  the  qualities 
we  most  need  on  the  stage  at  this  juncture. 

He  does  not  moralise  like  Shaw  ;  he  just  stands  aside, 
draws  the  curtain  and  lets  his  characters  develop 
normally,  shocking  us  by  their  crudity,  pleasing  us 
with  their  reality,  tickling  our  minds  with  their 
"  foreign  "  method  of  speech  and  code  of  manners. 
Mr  Brighouse  has  learnt  hoAv  effective  the  Lancashire 
dialect  can  be  to  amuse  a  London  audience.     It  is  on 


MODERN  DRAMA  173 

the  same  plane  as  the  Scots  brogue  in  Bunty  pulls  the 
Strings  or  the  Irish  in  the  Synge  plays. 

The  debt  owed  by  the  drama  to  Masefield,  that 
versatile  genius  who  succeeds  in  whatever  form  of 
literary  composition  he  undertakes,  is  by  no  means 
inconsiderable.  Pompey  the  Great  no  doubt  owes  its 
modern  note  to  Ccesar  and  Cleopatra,  but  its  poetry  is 
all  Masefield's  own.  Xan  is  an  attempt  to  create  a 
new  form  of  drama  in  which  beauty  and  the  high 
things  of  the  soul  may  pass  from  the  stage  to  the  mind, 
a  result  of  that  power  of  exultation  which  comes  from 
a  delighted  brooding  on  excessive,  terrible  things. 
It  is  only  by  such  a  vision  as  is  presented  to  us  in  plays 
of  this  calibre  that  the  multitude  can  be  brought  to 
the  passionate  knowledge  of  things  exulting  and  eternal. 

The  short,  staccato  sentences  of  Masefield,  who  always 
works  with  an  economy  of  vocabulary  little  short  of 
astounding,  are  like  scintillating  jewels.  Like  all  his 
great  contemporaries,  he  lets  his  puppets  loose  and 
watches  them  develop  ;  no  one  is  ever  the  same  at 
the  end  as  he  was  at  the  beginning  of  the  play,  whether 
actor  or  audience ;  it  is  all  nonsense  to  pretend  that 
we  are  depressed  by  an  artistic  representation  of  the 
terrible  ;  it  is  only  the  exploitation  of  the  sordid  by  the 
muck-merchants  that  revolts  us  ;  there  is  an  intellectual 
delight  to  be  found  in  all  real  tragedy  unlike  any  other 
sort  of  delight  in  the  world  .  .  .  and  yet  we  are  told 
that  because  it  is  war-time  we  must  not  have  serious 
plays:  "They  will  make  us  brood."  Nothing 
could  be  further  from  the  truth. 

The  quarrel,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  goes  deeper  than  that. 
It  is  a  question  of  the  unintelligence  of  the  English 
stage  as  a  whole.  The  public  is  given  what  the  public 
wants  ;  there  are  hundreds  of  intelligent  dramatists 
only  too  anxious  to  put  intelligent  dramas  on  to  the 


174  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

boards,  but  they  are  kept  out  in  the  cold,  solely  because 
the  managers  will  not  risk  taking  on  their  shoulders  the 
education  of  the  public.  Had  this  not  been  so  we 
should  not  have  Arnold  Bennett  lying  fallow  at  this 
moment. 

Cupid  and  Commonsense,  What  the  Public  Wants, 
Milestones  and  The  Great  Adventure  may  not  be  highly 
imaginative  plays,  but  they  are  intelligent,  they  have 
humour,  they  did  fill  a  most  pronounced  gap  in  the 
history  of  English  drama ;  they  left  the  audience 
pondering  over  various  problems  of  modern  life,  with  a 
determination  to  get  more  out  of  existence,  to  see,  to 
move,  to  squeeze  whatever  juice  they  could  from  the 
inchoate,  humdrum  medley  of  contradictions  which 
made  up  their  days.  Furthermore,  they  lent  them- 
selves to  good  acting  and  bringing  out  the  latent  talent 
of  all  the  cast. 

None  of  these  modern  dramatists  ever  write,  one-man 
plays.  All  the  subsidiary  characters  have  their  own 
intrinsic  importance;  they  are  not  mere  puppets, 
who  walk  on  and  off,  arousing  on  interest.  We  are 
keenly  alive  to  the  human  side  of  all  the  dramatis 
personam.  Galsworthy,  of  course,  like  Shaw,  uses  the 
stage  as  a  platform  for  the  presentation  of  his  theses 
on  social  problems.  More  than  any  contemporary 
artist  he  detaches  himself  from  his  characters,  and  gives 
both  sides  of  a  case  with  scrupulous  fairness.  In 
Strife  we  are  compelled  to  admire  both  the  conservative 
stolidity  and  courageous  obstinacy  of  the  capitalist, 
and  the  struggle  of  the  men  against  their  employers. 
Galsworthy  will  never  show  his  hand.  He  has  a  superb 
sense  of  situation  and  of  atmosphere,  and  presents 
both  with  beautiful,  consummate  artistry.  In  The 
Silver  Box  each  character  is  delineated  with  a  masterly 
insight  and  a  tremendous  sympathy  made  individualistic 


MODERN  DRAMA  175 

by  the  exact  truth  of  the  dialogue.  No  other  dramatist 
has  ever  succeeded  in  giving  the  everyday  talk  of 
the  artisan  and  charwoman  with  such  artistic  truth  ; 
his  favourite  maxim,  that  "  character  is  destiny,"  gives 
the  keynote  to  all  his  creatures,  particularly  to  the 
poor,  feckless  hero  of  Justice ;  he  is  always  quiet  and 
relentlessly  logical,  and  never  makes  a  bid  for  our 
tears,  which  may  account  for  the  extent  to  which  our 
emotions  are  always  roused  on  witnessing  one  of  his 
plays.  He  rouses  us  to  fury  by  his  carefully  feigned 
aloofness  ;  the  truth  is  that  he  himself  is  passionately 
alive  to  the  anomalies  of  the  law  and  the  dire  and  awful 
penalties  that  man  incurs,  unwitting,  by  taking  one 
false  step.  His  conception  of  tragedy  is  akin  to 
Shakespeare's  :  man  sets  the  wheels  of  Fate  in  motion 
and  no  power  on  earth  can  prevent  them  from  slowly 
crushing  him  and  grinding  round  to  their  inexorable 
end.  "The  wheel  is  come  full  circle:  I  am  here" 
might  well  be  taken  for  the  text  of  all  his  plays. 

Yet  just  as  the  Elizabethan  audience,  in  the  intervals 
of  fighting,  could  and  did  revel  in  the  tragedies  of 
Shakespeare,  delighting  therein,  so  surely  would  our 
warriors  of  to-day  find  solace  and  comfort  in  witnessing 
these  plays  of  Galsworthy  with  their  artistic  beauty  and 
philosophic  quietude.  They  supplied  a  craving  of  the 
soul  when  they  were  first  written,  in  the  far-off  days  of 
peace.  Surely  our  souls  do  not  crave  less  for  inspiration 
now  than  they  did  then.  War  does  not  blunt  our 
aesthetic  faculties  ;  rather  does  it  sharpen  them  through 
personal  and  national  suffering. 

With  the  exception  of  Mr  Brighouse,  Sir  James 
Barrie  is  the  only  dramatist  of  the  first  order  who  has 
a  play  now  running :  it  is  significant  that  this  is  not 
only  a  revival,  but  one  of  his  earliest  and  weakest 
fantasies.     The  Professor's  Love  Story  is  not  of  such  a 


176  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

kind  as  to  cause  us  to  stop  over  it ;  it  is  sentimental, 
machine-made  and  not  capable  ol  bearing  careful 
scrutiny. 

He  has  made  numbers  of  mistakes  as  Stevenson 
foreshadowed  as  long  ago  as  1892  ("  Stuff  in  that  young 
man ;  but  he  must  see  and  not  be  too  funny  ") ;  he 
wrote  Rosy  Rapture,  which  would  have  damned  a  lesser 
man;  but  he  also  wrote  An  Admirable  Crichton 
and  Peter  Pan,  and  he  is  immediately  forgiven.  His 
strength  lies  in  his  power  to  rouse  our  delight  in  a  one- 
act  play,  Rosalind,  The  Will,  The  Twelve-pound  Look 
and  The  New  Word  —  he  can  quietly,  whimsically 
yet  quite  surely  in  one  little  half-hour  make  us  run 
through  the  whole  gamut  of  human  emotions  ;  he  is 
a  master  of  quaint  conceits,  of  bizarre  touches  and 
childlike  ingeniousness  —  and  yet  all  the  time,  as 
Mr  Dixon  Scott  so  superbly  puts  it,  we  are  cognisant 
of  two  quite  separate  "  egos  "  fighting  for  the  mastery  in 
this  man's  composition  :  one,  the  solemn  aspirant,  tre- 
mendously aware  of  the  dignity  of  letters,  worshipping 
portraits  of  great  writers  with  all  the  grim  ambitious- 
ness  of  the  Scot;  the  other,  an  incurable  lover  of 
the  pretty  and  the  prankish.  People  are  fond  of  saying 
that  he  has  never  grown  up ;  the  truth  is  that  he  has 
grown  down  and  dwindled  just  when  he  longed  most 
passionately  to  tower,  and  finds  his  feet  perversely 
trotting  off  to  the  Round  Pond  to  play  with  children, 
when  all  the  time  he  was  ordering  them  to  mount  the 
granite  staircase  that  leads  to  lasting  fame.  "  When 
he  is  neither  humorous  nor  pathetic  he  is  nothing," 
says  Arnold  Bennett;  "imagine  a  diet  all  salt  and 
sugar  " — and  this  is,  in  truth,  the  final  word  with 
regard  to  him.  He  is  always  touching  us  to  laughter 
or  tears  ;  no  one  living  can  move  us  more  quickly  to 
weep  with  laughter  and  then,  within  a  moment,  cause 


MODERN  DRAMA  177 

us  to  weep  with  grief,  only  to  laugh  hilariously  again 
the  next  second.  His  diet  is  really  all  condiments : 
there  is  no  "  body  "  in  it,  no  lasting  nutriment,  as  there 
is  in  the  work  of  Galsworthy  and  Barker — and  yet 
there  is  artistry,  there  is  a  shimmery  sort  of  beauty, 
opalescent,  gossamer. 

Few  of  our  theatrical  optimists,  in  1913,  would  have 
dared  to  prophesy  that  by  1916  St  John  Hankin  would 
be  dead,  but  his  name  has  crossed  the  lips  of  no  play- 
goer since  the  war  began.  Surely  we  have  not  advanced 
so  far  that  we  can  afford  to  neglect  such  supremely 
witty,  clarifying,  astringent  work  as  The  Charity  that 
Began  at  Home,  The  Cassilis  Engagement  and  The 
Return  of  the  Prodigal.  He  has  something  of  the 
aristocratic  detachment  of  Galsworthy,  the  same 
limpid,  musical  prose  style  and  acute  perception  of 
dialogue  —  all  of  which  excellences  are  sadly  to 
seek  in  the  stage  to-day ;  we  might  as  well  shut  our 
eyes  to  the  beauty  of  Wilde.  They  have  this  much 
in  common :  a  shrewd  sense  of  humour  and  a  telling 
sense  of  "  situation."  Hankin  cared  a  good  deal  about 
social  problems,  Wilde  not  at  all.  Both  were  devoted 
to  the  cause  of  art,  and  gave  of  their  best  to  make  the 
stage  intelligent  and  literary.  Perhaps  no  other  man 
is  so  well  qualified  to  make  us  forget  the  miseries  of  our 
own  time  as  a  genius  of  Wilde's  temperament,  with  his 
astonishing  epigram  and  paradox,  his  remoteness  from 
actual  workaday  life  and  amoral  attitude  to  every- 
thing. 

The  English  theatre  is  in  dire  need  of  brains.  .  .  .  We 
have  borne,  for  two  and  a  half  years,  more  or  less  sadly, 
with  ephemeral,  sentimental  rubbish,  gaudy  pageantry, 
cheap  melodrama,  American  "  revue,"  musical  comedy, 
rowdy  farces,  one-man  "  light  "  comedies,  all  written 
with   an  eye  on  the  gallery  ;    it  is  time  some  brave 

M 


178  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

producer  took  his  stand  and  resuscitated  legitimate 
drama,  revived  Wilde,  Hankin,  Bennett,  Synge, 
Houghton,  Arthur  Symons,  Stephen  Phillips,  Chesterton, 
Masefield,  Barker  and  Shaw  (what  joys  their  very 
names  conjure  up  to  the  lover  of  art !)  and  encouraged 
the  young  geniuses  of  the  new  generation  to  follow  in 
their  steps  and  perfect  what  they  left  undone.  There 
is  no  lack  of  native  latent  talent ;  it  is  only  waiting  for 
an  invitation  to  come  forward. 

It  is  not  immorality  that  we  charge  the  stage  with 
nowadays  :  it  is  dullness,  sheer  blankness,  a  desperate, 
stereotyped  form  of  entertainment,  without  a  spark  of 
originality,  relying  on  age-old,  threadbare  jests,  inane 
dialogue,  and  an  absence  of  any  artistry.  The  acting 
is  all  right.  It  is  marvellous  how  much  our  leading 
actors  and  actresses  can  get  out  of  the  wooden,  lifeless 
parts  which  are  assigned  to  them. 

We  cannot  too  often  repeat  Synge' s  dictum  that  on 
the  stage  one  must  have  reality  and  joy  ;  as  at  present 
constituted  there  is  a  lamentable  absence  of  both. 
Nothing  could  well  be  further  removed  from  either  than 
the  plays  which  are  commonly  accounted  successes  ; 
a  false,  hysterical  giggling  has  supplanted  joy,  and  an 
artificial  convention,  as  remote  from  actuality  as  the 
feuilleton  in  a  halfpenny  paper,  has  taken  the  place 
of  realism. 

We  never  needed  amusement  more  than  we  do  now  ; 
we  do  not  want,  as  Shaw  tried  to  delude  himself  into 
believing,  the  theatre  turned  into  a  sort  of  pulpit,  but 
we  do  want  it  to  appeal  to  our  sense  of  the  beautiful, 
and  our  intellectual  senses.  We  do  not  want  to  be 
sent  to  sleep;  we  want  to  be  transported,  as  Shake- 
speare, Goldsmith  and  Sheridan  transported  our  fathers, 
into  a  land  of  sheer  delights  ;  we  want  to  feel  again 
the  purgative  joys  of  true  tragedy,  to  revel   in  the 


MODERN  DRAMA  179 

rarefied  atmosphere  of  pure  comedy,  to  laugh  at  the 
manifestation  of  the  Comic  Spirit,  not  to  cackle  like 
buffoons  at  the  antics  of  clowns  and  vulgar  double 
entendres. 

We  look  to  Mr  Grein  ...  is  there  no  public  bene- 
factor forthcoming  who  will  earn  the  undying  gratitude 
of  a  public  satiated  with  rubbish  by  coming  to  our 
rescue  before  we  entirely  forget  the  theatre's  true  place 
as  an  educative  force,  an  elevator  and  not  a  debaser 
of  all  that  is  best  in  us  ? 


VII 
SAMUEL   BUTLER 


TO  the  question,  "  What  sort  of  man  was  the 
author  of  Erewhon  ?  "  I  suppose  the  best  and 
quickest  answer  would  be  :  "  He  was  the  sort 
of  man  who  preferred  Handel  above  all  other  com- 
posers, Italy  above  all  other  countries,  disliked  Tenny- 
son, Dickens  and  Thackeray,  and  was  not  afraid  to  say 
so,  and,  according  to  Shaw's  own  account,  was  the 
prime  influence  in  the  formation  of  that  iconoclast's 
character." 

That  he  is  still  but  little  known  in  educational 
quarters  can  be  gauged  by  the  fact  that  at  one  great 
Public  School  the  librarian  bought  from  Mr  Fifield  his 
complete  works,  under  the  impression  that  they  were 
by  the  author  of  Hudibras.  I  know  of  no  other  big 
school  where  the  complete  works  of  our  Samuel  Butler 
are  to  be  found.  He  was  related  neither  to  the  Bishop 
nor  to  the  Restoration  poet.  His  grandfather  was  the 
headmaster  of  Shrewsbury;  his  father  the  vicar  of 
Langar,  near  Nottingham,  where  Samuel  himself  was 
born  on  4th  December  1835.  He  naturally  attended 
the  school  where  his  grandfather  had  been  headmaster, 
and  was  there  for  six  years.  In  1854  he  went  up  to 
St  John's  College,  Cambridge,  and  took  a  first-class  in 
the  Classical  Tripos  in  1858.  In  the  same  year  he  went 
to  London  with  the  idea  of  working  among  the  poor  and 
eventually  taking  Holy  Orders,  but  he  now  began  to 
doubt  the  efficacy  of  infant  baptism,  which  led  to  his 
abandoning  this  project,  and  he  sailed  to  New  Zealand 

180 


SAMUEL  BUTLER  181 

and  started  sheep-farming  instead.  His  interest  in 
Darwin's  theory  of  Selection  began  to  manifest  itself 
in  1862,  when  he  wrote  to  "  the  Press  "  on  the  subject  in 
an  article  called  Darwin  on  the  Origin  of  Species — A 
Dialogue.  In  1864  he  returned  to  England  and  settled 
down  for  the  rest  of  his  life  at  15  Clifford's  Inn,  London, 
as  a  painter,  exhibiting  at  the  Royal  Academy  and  else- 
where. He  had  constantly  been  over  to  Italy  since  his 
early  boyhood,  and  in  1870  he  returned  thereto  recover 
from  a  spell  of  overwork.  The  same  year  he  met  Miss 
Eliza  Mary  Ann  Savage,  who  so  influenced  the  rest  of 
his  life,  and  wrhose  character  is  so  splendidly  portrayed 
in  Alethea  in  The  Way  of  All  Flesh.  In  1872  Erewhon 
was  published,  and  the  following  year  saw  the  publica- 
tion of  The  Fair  Haven,  an  ironical  work  purporting  to 
be  "  in  defence  of  the  miraculous  element  in  our  Lord's 
ministry  upon  earth,  both  as  against  rationalistic 
impugners  and  certain  orthodox  defenders,"  written 
under  the  pseudonym  of  John  Pickard  Owen,  writh  a 
memoir  of  the  supposed  author  by  his  brother,  William 
Bickersteth  Owen. 

This  book,  to  Butler's  supreme  joy,  was  taken 
seriously  by  certain  Church  papers  and  praised  for  its 
splendid  defence  of  orthodox  Christianity. 

Between  1876  and  1886  he  experienced  serious 
financial  difficulties,  but  he  had  the  good  fortune  in  the 
first  of  these  years  to  make  the  acquaintance  of  Mr 
Henry  Festing  Jones,  who  has  preserved  for  us  so  many 
of  his  conversations  and  given  us  Butler's  greatest  work 
in  The  Notebooks,  wherein  is  contained  all  the  cream 
of  his  philosophy  and  humour. 

In  1877  was  published  Life  and  Habit,  which  gives  in 
detail  his  views  on  Darwin's  theory  and  his  points  of 
divergence  from  it.  It  was  followed,  in  1881,  by  Alps 
and  Sanctuaries,  one  of  his  most  interesting  and  perhaps 


182  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

the  most  charming  of  his  works,  as  he  wrote  it  in  holiday 
mood  and  illustrated  it  throughout  himself.  In  1883 
he  began  to  compose  music  as  nearly  as  he  could  in  the 
style  of  Handel.  Two  years  later  Miss  Savage  died, 
and  the  year  following  the  death  of  his  father  finally 
ended  his  financial  distress. 

In  1892  he  gave  his  lecture  on  The  Humour  of  Homer, 
in  which  we  see,  for  the  first  time,  his  conception 
as  to  the  authorship  of  the  Odyssey,  which  he  main- 
tained was  written  by  a  woman  and  very  probably  by 
Nausicaa. 

In  1897  he  printed  The  Authoress  of  the  Odyssey,  to 
strengthen  this  view,  and  in  1899  he  published  a  most 
valuable  criticism  on  Shakespeare's  Sonnets,  in  which 
he  follows  the  autobiographical  tradition  very  strongly. 
1901  saw  the  publication  of  Erewhon  Revisited,  and  on 
18th  June  1902  he  died,  leaving  behind  the  MS.  of 
his  purely  autobiographical  novel,  The  Way  of  All 
Flesh,  which  was  published  by  R.  A.  Streatfeild  in 
1903. 

As  everyone  knows,  Butler's  fame  in  his  lifetime  was 
not  great,  but  every  year  since  his  death  has  increased 
the  circle  of  his  readers.  Gilbert  Caiman's  able  book, 
followed  by  that  of  Mr  John  F.  Harris,  has  done  much 
to  keep  him  before  the  public  eye,  and  it  is  probable 
that  as  time  goes  on  the  thinking  public  will  be  attracted 
more  and  more  to  a  man  who  could  think  so  clearly, 
argue  so  convincingly,  preserve  so  perfect  a  sense  of 
humour  and  freshen  and  enliven  the  imagination  and 
the  intellect  as  Samuel  Butler  did.  He  is  certainly 
safe  for  his  "  good  average  threescore  years  and  ten 
of  immortality  "  if  ever  man  was. 


SAMUEL  BUTLER  183 

II 

To  anyone  beginning  to  read  Butler  for  the  first  time 
I  should  recommend  The  Way  of  All  Flesh,  Alps  and 
Sanctuaries,  The  Humour  of  Homer  (together  with  the 
other  essays  in  that  delightful  book)  and  The  Note- 
books— that  is  for  a  person  constituted  as  I  am,  with  no 
very  definite  leanings  to  biology  and  the  laws  of  natural 
selection.  Erewhon  as  a  modern  Utopia  is  a  magnifi- 
cent piece  of  writing  and  worked  out  with  a  skill  that 
Swift  would  not  have  been  ashamed  of.  To  the 
majority  of  readers,  however,  Butler  is  just  the  author 
of  Erewhon  and  nothing  more  ;  everyone  has  read  that. 
I  need  therefore  scarcely  waste  time  in  describing  what 
most  people  know. 

"  In  the  department  of  satire,"  as  Bernard  Shaw  once 
most  truly  said,  "  Butler  is  the  greatest  English  writer 
of  the  latter  half  of  the  nineteenth  century. "  It  is  very 
much  to  be  doubted  whether  irony  has  ever  had  a  cleaner 
or  more  sparkling  exponent  in  this  country  at  all. 
There  was  so  little  bitterness  in  Butler  :  he  was  all  com- 
pact of  quaint,  whimsical,  jovial  touches  ;  he  was  one 
who  loved  life  even  after  being  granted  a  view  into  the 
crystal,  such  as  is  given  to  but  few. 

The  Way  of  All  Flesh  perhaps  ought  to  be  read  first 
in  order  that  the  reader  may  gain  an  exact  picture  of  the 
sort  of  man  Butler  was.  Many  modern  readers  find  it 
fatiguing  to  be  taken  back  over  so  many  generations  of 
the  life  of  the  Pontif ex  family,  but  what  Butler  had  to  un- 
fold required  a  sense  of  leisure  ;  he  recognised  that  to 
the  making  of  a  great  book  went  years  of  labour,  and  he 
was  content  to  draw  on  a  big  canvas  so  that  we  should 
get  the  proper  perspective  of  his  own  life.  We  are 
shown  the  hideous,  convention-ridden  atmosphere  of  a 


184  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

country  parsonage  in  all  its  phases,  and  never  has  this 
odious  existence  been  more  ruthlessly  exposed  or  with 
such  wealth  of  detail.  We  are  given  the  boy's  life  at 
school,  with  the  gradual  dawning  of  his  doubts  as  to 
many  of  the  things  which  the  Victorians  adhered  to 
like  limpets  as  part  and  parcel  of  their  creed,  without 
which  the  whole  fabric  of  their  lives  would  fall  about 
their  ears. 

His  life  in  lodgings  in  London  is  so  vividly  done  that 
nothing  could  ever  make  us  forget  Mrs  Jupp,  who 
deserves  to  live  longer  than  Mrs  Gamp,  or  Mrs  Gum- 
midge  as  an  eternal  type,  imperishable  so  long  as 
human  nature  remains  what  it  is.  His  adventures  with 
his  fellow-lodgers  are  ghastly,  and  yet  how  inevitably 
true  .  .  .  that  is  what  so  attracts  us  about  the  whole 
book  :  it  is  absolutely  real ;  you  don't  feel  at  all  that 
it  was  written  about  an  age  long  past  which  we  abhor 
beyond  all  others.  It  would  be  just  as  true  were  it 
written  about  life  to-day.  Perhaps  we  care  less  about 
these  strange  cavillings  over  orthodox  beliefs.  We  are 
also  more  emancipated  in  other  ways,  but  we,  too,  have 
just  the  same  fight  for  the  right  to  live  our  own  lives 
even  if  the  hydras  we  oppose  are  slightly  different  from 
those  against  which  Samuel  Butler  so  successfully  tilted. 
The  romance  of  his  life  we  can  only  guess  at,  We  know 
how  much  he  cared  for  Miss  Savage  .  .  .  we  should 
have  known  that  from  his  picture  of  Alethea  alone. 
Why  lie  never  married  her  we  do  not  know  ;  his  affec- 
tion for  her  may  have  been  like  Swift's  for  Stella  ;  it 
certainly  seems  so  to  the  casual  reader. 

Authors  are  notorious  for  the  way  they  mess  up  the 
best  part  of  their  lives  ;  their  relations  with  their 
womenfolk  are  best  left  alone  ;  it  is  hard  to  probe  their 
reasons  and  not  altogether  important. 

The  feeling  that  one  has  on  finishing  The  Way  of  All 


SAMUEL  BUTLER  185 

Flesh  is  that  we  must  begin  it  all  over  again  at  once  .  .  . 
we  then  wish  and  wish  that  he  had  written  not  one  but 
twenty  novels — so  terse  a  style,  so  definite  a  point 
of  view,  so  much  sense,  so  little  padding  is  not  to  be 
seen  once  in  ten  years  in  the  novels  of  to-day. 


Ill 


Alps  and  Sanctuaries  was  received  with  contemptuous 
silence  from  the  critics,  for  the  most  part ;  those  who 
mentioned  it  treated  it  with  open  hostility.  It  is  im- 
possible to  imagine  either  point  of  view  to-day.  It  is 
an  open-air,  genial  book  packed  with  good  things,  not 
least  among  which  are  the  amazing  sketches  from  the 
pencil  of  Butler  himself.  It  is  simply  an  account  of  a 
walking  tour  through  Italy  taken  by  Butler  in  the  com- 
pany of  his  friend,  Festing  Jones.  In  it  we  find  that 
overmastering  love  of  Handel,  which  was  one  of  Butler's 
most  pronounced  characteristics,  coming  out  on  every 
page  :  a  chapel,  a  valley,  a  snow-clad  peak,  a  village 
any  picturesque  setting  sets  him  off  and  he  im- 
mediately puts  it  to  music.  He  is  reminded  of  a  snatch 
from  an  oratorio  of  Handel,  and  puts  it  straight  down 
in  the  book,  and  so  insidious  is  his  description  that  he 
makes  you  see  the  place  more  clearly  than  any  other 
writer,  solely  because  of  his  threefold  power  of  attract- 
ing you  by  his  music,  his  painting  and  his  writing. 

He  tells  us  all  sorts  of  interesting  things  about  him- 
self :  of  his  dislike  of  Milton,  of  his  habit  of  marking  in 
red  on  the  ordnance  map  the  places  he  passes.  He  gives 
you  exquisite  hints  for  the  avoidance  of  canting, 
hypocritical  points  of  view. 

Witness  this  test  for  liking  a  picture  : 


186  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

"  Would  you  care  to  look  at  it  alone  ?  " 
and  this  for  the  appreciation  of  good  music  : 

"  Do  you  find  your  attention  straying  to  the  adver- 
tisements on  the  back  of  the  programme  ?  " 

His  sense  of  the  whimsical  is  almost  Celtic,  and  re- 
minds us  of  James  Stephens.  "  The  potato  is  a  good- 
tempered,  frivolous  plant,  easily  aroused  and  easily 
bored ;  and  one,  moreover,  which,  if  bored,  yawns 
horribly.  .  .  ."  "  The  spider  is  an  ugly  creature,  but  I 
suppose  God  likes  it." 

It  is  in  Alps  and  Sanctuaries  that  there  occurs  that 
famous  emendation  :  ' '  There  lives  more  doubt  in 
honest  faith,  believe  me,  than  in  .  .  ." — which  was 
corrected  in  the  margin  of  the  British  Museum  copy 
(a  story  that  sounds  too  good  to  be  true).  How 
Butler  would  have  loved  to  have  seen  that  marginal 
correction  ! 

Philosophy,  too,  abounds.  "  A  bad  sign  for  man's 
peace  in  his  own  convictions  when  he  cannot  stand 
turning  the  canvas  of  his  life  upside  down."  This 
might  have  been  taken  by  G.  K.  Chesterton  for  his  life 
motto,  so  exactly  does  it  fit  that  robust  Christian. 

"  Sourtout  point  de  zele,"  he  continues,  "  take  a 
spiritual  outing  occasionally,  try  seasonarianism,  people 
must  go  to  church  to  be  a  little  better,  to  the  theatre  to 
be  a  little  naughtier,  to  the  Royal  Institution  to  be  a 
little  more  scientific  than  they  really  are." 

Is  there  not  some  healthy,  breezy  sort  of  feeling  that 
comes  over  you  as  you  read  that  ?  No  one  but  a 
definitely  religious  and  devout  man  could  have  written 
it — one  who  had  resolutely  faced  all  the  problems  that 
worry  humanity  and  forced  an  answer  out  of  the 
infinite.  Samuel  Butler,  most  of  all  men,  was  delighted 
to  wrestle  with  that  same  spirit  whom  Jacob  met  .  .  . 
but  who  nowadays,  for  some  reason,  leaves  us  alone  to 


SAMUEL  BUTLER  187 

our  flabby  unfitness.  (I  am  speaking  here  solely  of 
moral  fitness,  of  course.)  His  literary  criticism  is  of  a 
piece  with  his  philosophical. 

"  Disraeli's  novels  are  so  much  better  than  those 
of  Thackeray  and  Dickens  because  he  was  always 
growing." 

Then  comes  the  startling  information  that  "  any 
man  who  can  write  can  draw  to  a  not  inconsiderable 
extent." 

The  day  I  first  read  that  I  went  out  on  to  the  Downs 
and  endeavoured  to  depict  on  paper  with  a  pen  what  I 
had  already  described  in  an  article.  My  friends  were 
not  too  sanguine  about  the  result,  but  I  hope  that  does 
not  mean  that  the  contradictory  converse  is  true  and 
that  he  who  cannot  draw  cannot  write. 

From  what  I  have  already  culled  you  will  gather  that 
Butler  will  have  something  fresh  to  say  on  every  subject, 
and  not  least  on  education.  The  only  system  that  has 
any  working  value  in  his  eyes  is  the  apprenticeship 
system.  "  The  principle  is  that  a  man  should  be  doing 
something  he  is  bent  on  doing  and  get  a  younger  one  to 
help  him.  The  elder  takes  the  work  of  the  younger  in 
payment." 

Apropos  of  examinations  :  "  The  most  examination- 
ridden  people  in  the  world  are  the  Chinese,  and  they 
are  the  least  progressive." 

With  regard  to  worrying  about  the  way  to  fame : 
"  Doors  are  like  the  Kingdom  of  Heaven,  they  come  not 
by  observation,  least  of  all  do  they  come  by  forcing ; 
let  them  just  go  on  doing  what  comes  nearest,  atten- 
tively, and  a  great  wide  door  will  one  day  spring  into 
existence."  Optimist !  And  this  is  the  man  whom 
short-sighted  critics  have  called  bitter. 

He  takes  an  apt  simile  from  climbing  in  his  advice  to 
would-be  artists  and  writers  :  "  Nothing  taxes  so  much 


188  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

as  looking  up,  nothing  encourages  so  much  as  looking 
down.  It  does  a  beginner  positive  harm  to  look  at  the 
masterpieces  of  Turner  and  Rembrandt.  The  secrets 
of  success  are  affection  for  the  pursuit  chosen,  a  flat 
refusal  to  be  hurried  or  to  pass  anything  as  understood 
which  is  not  understood,  and  an  obstinacy  of  character 
.  .  .  together  with  a  slight  infusion  of  its  direct 
opposite.'' 

We  close  the  book  on  a  note  ringing  like  a  gale  sweep- 
ing all  our  preconceived,  second-hand  theories  away  like 
a  piece  of  paper  on  the  rocks. 

"Raffaelle,  Plato,  M.  Aurelius,  Dante,  Goethe  and  two 
others  (neither  of  them  Englishmen)  should  be  consigned 
to  limbo  as  the  Seven  Humbugs  of  Christendom." 

I  said  :  "  We  close  the  book."  I  am  wrong.  The  wise 
man  will  find  infinite  enjoyment  in  perusing  the  index, 
where  he  will  be  sent  back  to  follow  up  such  clues  as  are 
given  by  "Pantheism  of  Rhubarb,"  or  "Rhinoceros 
grunts  a  fourth,"  and  other  delectable  treasures.  Alps 
and  Sanctuaries  deserves  far  more  fame  than  has  yet 
been  accorded  to  it.  It  is  a  joyous,  thoughtful  book 
■ — a  sort  of  Alice  in  Wonderland  of  a  great  scientist 
and  philosopher.  And  it  is  a  truism  that  the  holiday 
moods  of  these  world-thinkers  are  not  lightly  to  be 
despised  ;  their  lightning  flashes  of  merry  wit  are  all 
pregnant  with  illuminating,  blinding  shocks  which 
electrify  our  system  and  cause  us  to  delve  deeper  for 
ourselves  into  the  world's  mysteries  and  come  away 
from  our  search  enriched  beyond  all  our  wildest  dreams. 


IV 


One  of  the  many  things  we  missed  by  being  born 
about  the  time  of  Queen  Victoria's  jubilee  was  hearing 


SAMUEL  BUTLER  189 

Ruskin  lecture  ;  another  was  William  Morris.  To  this 
we  now  have  to  add  Samuel  Butler's  scintillating  gossip 
to  working  men  on  The  Humour  of  Homer.  How  he 
must  have  shaken  the  dovecotes  of  Oxford  and  Cam- 
bridge, if  they  even  so  much  as  heard  that  a  new 
prophet  had  arisen  who  knew  not  Homer  but  openly 
flaunted  his  belief  in  the  woman  authorship  of  the 
Odyssey.  His  translation  is  the  only  one  we  know 
which  renders  the  pure  spirit  of  the  Greek  into  modern, 
up-to-date  English  prose. 

Here,  if  anywhere,  he  has  followed  his  own  advice 
that  a  man  should  be  clear  of  his  meaning  before  he 
gives  it  any  utterance  ;  having  made  up  his  mind  what 
to  say,  he  should  say  it  briefly,  pointedly  and  plainly. 

It  is  in  this  book  that  we  learn  that  the  Burmah,  on 
which  he  fully  meant  to  sail  for  New  Zealand,  went 
down  with  all  hands.  "  Surely  there  is  a  Providence 
that  guides  our  ends."  It  is  in  The  Humour  of 
Homer  that  we  also  learn  that  Chapman  &  Hall,  to 
their  everlasting  disgrace,  refused  the  MS.  of  Erewhon, 
on  the  advice  of  no  less  gifted  a  critic  than  Meredith. 

Butler  conceived  a  theory,  fantastic  and  half- 
humorous,  that  Wordsworth  harboured  a  dark  secret 
in  his  life,  and  in  an  amazingly  humorous  passage 
annotates  the  text  of  one  of  the  "  Lucy  "  poems  to 
prove  that  he  had  done  the  poor  girl  to  death.  It  would 
have  puzzled  him  not  a  little  to  discover  that  he  was 
nearer  the  truth  than  he  thought,  and  that  it  remained 
for  an  American,  in  1916,  to  reveal  what  had  been 
successfully  hidden  from  the  world  for  over  a  century — 
namely,  that  Wordsworth,  the  revered  apostle  of  ortho- 
doxy, the  stand-by  of  all  who  believe  in  regularity  of 
living  and  rectitude  of  conduct,  was  the  father  of  a 
natural  child  by  a  French  girl  whom  he  was  unable  to 
marry. 


190  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

One  piece  of  advice  he  gives  us  with  regard  to  Homer 
which  should  be  engraven  on  a  text  and  distributed 
throughout  every  classroom  in  every  classical  school  in 
the  kingdom.  "  If  we  are  to  be  at  home  with  Homer, 
there  must  be  no  sitting  on  the  edge  of  one's  chair 
dazzled." 

It  is  here  that  he  makes  his  epigram  with  regard  to 
the  three  Samuel  Butlers  of  literary  fame. 

"  If « Erewhon'  were  a  horse  I  should  say  :  «  Erewhon 
by  Hudibras  out  of  Analogy,'  "  in  which  there  is  a  pro- 
fundity of  meaning  uncommon  in  epigrammatic  speech. 

It  delights  the  hearts  of  those  of  us  who  believe  that 
Shakespeare  drew  upon  his  acquaintances  for  his  major 
characters  to  find  that  Butler  believed  that  Mrs  Quickly 
was  found  by  the  dramatist  in  real  life  and  simply 
photographed  on  to  the  stage.  It  needed  courage  to 
say  this  in  the  eighties  with  impunity  ;  even  in  1916 
such  a  statement  does  not  go  unscathed. 

There  is  a  splendid  paragraph  in  this  book  on  "  Titles 
for  Books  I  hope  to  Write. ' '  One  of  the  most  inspiring  is 
"Half-Hours  with  the  Worst  Authors. "  How  many  of  us 
could  submit  endless  cuttings  for  that  gallery  nowadays. 


And  now  we  are  come  to  the  book  whereon  we  should 
be  content  te  let  all  Samuel  Butler's  fame  rest,  The  Note- 
books. In  this  volume  is  collected  together  all  the  germs 
of  all  his  work  in  tablet,  portmanteau  form.  To  read 
them  is  to  copy  them  out ;  to  copy  them  out  is  to  learn 
them ;  and  to  learn  them  is  an  education  in  itself. 

Apparently  Butler  carried  a  notebook  about  with 
him  wherever  he  went,  and  copied  into  it  whatever  of 
value  he  heard  anyone  say  or  whatever  he  said  himself 


SAMUEL  BUTLER  191 

that  struck  him  as  worthy  of  preservation.     His  reason 
for  copying  them  was  : 

"  One's  thoughts  fly  so  fast  that  one  must  shoot 
them  ;  it  is  no  use  trying  to  put  salt  on  their  tails." 

By  the  time  that  he  came  to  die  he  had  filled  well 
over  five  bound  volumes,  each  one  taking  up  over  two 
hundred  pages  of  closely  written  sermon  paper.  These 
he  wrote  in  copying  ink,  in  order  to  keep  a  duplicate 
of  them,  and  we  learn  from  them  about  his  early  life 
at  Langar,  Handel,  schooldays  at  Shrewsbury,  Cam- 
bridge, Christianity,  literature,  New  Zealand,  sheep- 
farming,  philosophy,  painting,  money,  evolution, 
morality,  Italy,  speculation,  photography,  music, 
natural  history,  archaeology,  botany,  religion,  book- 
keeping, psychology,  metaphysics,  the  Iliad,  the 
Odyssey,  Sicily,  architecture,  ethics,  the  Sonnets  of 
Shakespeare,  and  a  thousand  and  one  other  things 
about  life  which  interested  him. 

This  we  now  have  bound  up  in  one  volume  of  four 
hundred  pages,  owing  to  the  indefatigable  energy  of 
Mr  Festing  Jones,  who  sifted  and  pruned  and  condensed 
and  classified  such  as  he  found  worthy  of  permanence, 
and,  as  I  said,  the  result  is  that  The  Notebooks  will 
remain  for  all  time  as  the  essence  of  all  that  is  best  in 
the  work  of  this  inspired  humorist. 

They  are  divided  up  into  twenty-five  sections,  oddly 
titled  in  some  cases,  but  in  no  case  to  be  omitted  by 
those  who  would  learn  more  of  life  and  morality  as  seen 
by  the  acutest  man  of  his  time.  The  first  section  is 
headed  :  "  Lord,  what  is  Man  ?  "  and  deals  with  man- 
kind in  general.  The  following  note  is  perhaps  typical 
of  all :  "A  man  is  a  passing  mood  coming  up  and  going 
down  in  the  mind  of  his  country  :  he  is  the  twitching  of 
a  nerve,  a  smile,  a  frown,  a  thought  of  shame  or  honour, 
as  it  may  happen." 


192  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

We  get  here  a  glimpse  of  that  theory  which  was  so 
characteristic  of  Butler,  that  death  was  nothing,  our 
immortality  was  the  thought  with  which  we  enriched 
the  world  or  that  shameful  deed  which  impoverished  it. 
As  to  the  art  of  living,  he  says  :  "A  sense  of  humour 
keen  enough  to  show  a  man  his  own  absurdities,  as  well 
as  those  of  other  people,  will  keep  him  from  the  com- 
mission of  all  sins,  or  nearly  all,  save  those  that  are 
worth  committing."  This  little  tang  in  the  tail  of  his 
epigrams  reminds  us  of  Rupert  Brooke  and  strikes  a 
note  which  is  commonly  supposed  to  be  much  more 
modern  than  the  Victorian  age  in  which  Butler  lived. 
"  Life  is  like  music,"  he  continues.  "  It  must  be 
composed  by  ear,  feeling  and  instinct,  not  by  rule. 
Nevertheless,  one  had  better  know  the  rules,  for  they 
sometimes  guide  in  doubtful  cases — though  not  often." 

It  comes  as  a  shock  to  the  "  unco'  guid,"  but  how  it 
must  have  delighted  the  heart  of  the  youthful  G.  B.  S. 
to  hear  his  master  say  that  all  progress  is  based  upon  a 
universal  innate  desire  on  the  part  of  every  organism 
to  live  beyond  its  income  .  .  .  followed  by  the  quaint 
confession  that  he  was  glad  that  he  had  squandered  a 
good  deal  of  his  life.  ..."  What  a  heap  of  rubbish 
there  would  have  been  if  I  had  not,"  he  whimsically 
concludes.  Life  beyond  the  grave  to  him  means 
seventy  years  of  immortality,  of  fame  after  he  is  dead, 
as  a  guide  to  the  next  generations  of  Englishmen  who 
shall  come  after  him. 

A  delightful  piece  of  philosophy  is  contained  in  one  of 
his  earliest  notes,  to  the  effect  that  all  things  are  either 
of  the  nature  of  a  piece  of  string  or  a  knife.  One  makes 
for  "  togetheriness,"  the  other  for  "  splitty-uppiness." 
"  In  high  philosophy  one  should  never  look  at  a  piece  of 
string  without  considering  it  also  as  a  knife,  nor  at  a 
knife  without  considering  it  as  a  piece  of  string." 


SAMUEL  BUTLER  193 

The  second  section  is  on  Elementary  Morality,  where 
we  find  a  code  of  right  and  wrong  which  acts  like 
ammonia  on  our  dulled  senses.  "  When  the  righteous 
man  turneth  away  from  his  righteousness  that  he  hath 
committed  and  doeth  that  which  is  neither  quite  lawful 
nor  quite  right,  he  will  generally  be  found  to  have  gained 
in  amiability  what  he  has  lost  in  holiness.  It  is  as  im- 
moral to  be  too  good  as  to  be  too  anything  else.  How 
often  do  we  not  see  children  ruined  through  the  virtues, 
real  or  supposed,  of  their  parents  ?  Truly  he  visiteth 
the  virtues  of  the  fathers  upon  the  children  unto  the 
third  and  fourth  generation.  Vice  is  the  awakening  to 
the  knowledge  of  good  and  evil — without  which  there 
is  no  life  worthy  of  the  name.  There  cannot  be  a 
1  Hold  fast  that  which  is  good  '  without  a  '  Prove  all 
things  '  going  before  it." 

Here  we  see  the  reaction  against  the  Nottingham- 
shire Rectory  coming  out  with  a  vengeance.  This  is 
the  result  of  the  convention-ridden  atmosphere  of  strict 
Sabbatarianism.  Oh  !  that  men  might  be  made  to  see 
the  agony  they  inflict  on  their  children  by  a  thought- 
less, rigid  code  of  ethics,  doled  out  without  thought  of 
temperament  or  changing  times.  Here  is  a  text  that 
should  again  be  hung,  not  only  all  round  the  dormi- 
tories of  Public  Schools,  but  in  every  church  and  chapel 
in  the  British  Isles. 

It  is  also  as  well  that  some  of  us  should  take  to  heart 
what  our  doctors  so  frequently  tell  us,  that  intellectual 
over-indulgence  is  the  most  gratuitous  and  disgraceful 
form  which  excess  can  take ;  for  we  pride  ourselves 
hypocritically  on  the  fact  that  half  England  does  no 
work  at  all,  while  we  slave  for  our  daily  bread  night 
and  day  without  rest  throughout  the  livelong  year  .  .  . 
jboasting  about  it  as  if  it  were  a  virtue  ;  one  might  as 
[well  brag  of  drinking  night  and  day. 


194  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

The  extremes  of  vice  and  virtue,  Butler  is  never  tired 
of  pointing  out,  are  alike  detestable ;  absolute  virtue 
is  as  sure  to  kill  a  man  as  absolute  vice  is,  let  alone  the 
dullnesses  of  it  and  the  pomposities  of  it. 

It  sends  a  disagreeable  thrill  through  one's  too- 
comfortable  mind  to  remember  that,  after  all,  morality 
is  the  custom  of  one's  country  and  consequently  that 
cannibalism  is  moral  in  a  cannibal  country.  On  every 
page  of  The  Notebooks  we  see  more  and  more  how 
much  Shaw  owes  to  Butler ;  of  course  he  has  acknow- 
ledged the  debt,  but  for  some  inexplicable  reason  no  one 
has  yet  taken  the  trouble  to  believe  him.  Ignorant 
critics  still  hiss  Nietzsche,  and  we  are  content  to  leave 
it  at  that. 

Compare  this  statement,  for  instance,  with  countless 
passages  in  Shaw's  plays  :  "I  believe  that  more  un- 
happiness  comes  from  the  attempt  to  prolong  family 
connection  unduly  and  to  make  people  hang  together 
artificially  who  would  never  naturally  do  so  than  from 
any  other."  Why  !  here  is  the  whole  Shavian  bag  of 
tricks,  the  very  thing  that  has  sent  country  parsons 
boiling  over  with  rage  in  the  pulpit,  seething  with 
righteous  indignation  about  "  sacred  family  ties"  and 
all  the  rest  of  the  jargon  so  popular  among  that 
uneducated  type. 

VI 

I  propose  to  pass  over  the  notes  that  apply  to  such 
definitely  technical  theories  as  are  contained  in  the 
Darwin  controversy  and  the  germs  of  Erezvhon  and 
Life  and  Habit  because  I  am  endeavouring  here  simply 
to  show  how  necessary  Butler  is  to  all  who  think  at  all 
generally  or  care  about  the  laws  that  govern  our  mode 
of  life.     Butler's  contributions  to  evolution  are,  shortly : 


SAMUEL  BUTLER  195 

(1)  The  identification  of  heredity  and  memory  and  the 
corollaries  relating  to  sports,  the  reversion  to  remote  ances- 
tors, the  phenomena  of  old  age,  the  causes  of  the  sterility 
of  hybrids  and  the  principles  underlying  longevity. 

(2)  The  reintroduction  of  teleology  into  organic  life. 

(3)  An  explanation  of  the  physics  of  memory. 

(-1)  Vibrations — as  a  means  of  connection  between 
the  organic  and  inorganic. 

With  regard  to  vibrations  he  tells  us  that  we  shall 
never  get  straight  till  we  leave  off  tying  to  separate 
mind  and  matter.  Mind  is  not  a  thing,  or  if  it  be,  we 
know  nothing  about  it;  it  is  a  function  of  matter. 
Matter  is  not  a  thing,  or  if  it  be,  we  know  nothing 
about  it ;  it  is  a  function  of  mind. 

He  then  proceeds  to  take  an  apt  illustration  from  eat- 
ing. Cooking,  he  says,  is  good  because  it  makes  matter 
easier  by  unsettling  the  meat's  mind  and  preparing  it 
for  new  ideas.  So  with  thoughts ;  they  are  more  easily 
assimilated  that  have  been  already  digested  by  other 
minds. 

Sitting  quiet  after  eating  is  akin  to  sitting  still  during 
divine  service,  so  as  not  to  disturb  the  congregation. 
We  are  catechising  and  converting  our  proselytes,  and 
there  should  be  no  row.  As  we  get  older  we  must  digest 
more  quietly  still,  our  appetite  is  less,  our  gastric  juices 
are  no  longer  so  eloquent ;  they  have  lost  that  cogent 
fluency  which  carried  away  all  that  came  in  contact  with 
it.  They  have  become  sluggish  and  unconciliatory. 
This  is  what  happens  to  any  man  when  he  suffers  from 
an  attack  of  indigestion.  The  healthy  stomach  is 
nothing  if  not  conservative.  Few  radicals  have  good 
digestions. 

Again,  you  notice  the  sting  in  the  tail  which  increases 
the  value  of  the  whole  epigram  and  opens  up  a  whole 
new  field  of  thought. 


196  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

In  this  same  section  of  notes  on  Mind  and  Matter  we 
come  across  that  note  on  Nightshirts  and  Babies  which 
so  pleased  the  heart  of  John  Harris. 

"  On  Hindhead,  last  Easter,  we  saw  a  family  wash 
hung  out  to  dry.  There  were  papa's  two  great  night- 
shirts and  mamma's  two  lesser  nightgowns  and  then 
the  children's  smaller  articles  of  clothing  and  mamma's 
drawers  and  the  girls'  drawers,  all  full  swollen  with  a 
strong  north-east  wind.  But  mamma's  nightgown 
was  not  so  well  pinned  on  and,  instead  of  being  full  of 
steady  wind  like  the  others,  kept  blowing  up  and  down 
as  though  she  were  p reaching  wildly.  We  stood  and 
laughed  for  ten  minutes.  The  housewife  came  to  the 
window  and  wondered  at  us,  but  we  could  not  resist  the 
pleasure  of  watching  the  absurdly  lifelike  gestures 
which  the  nightgowns  made.  I  should  like  a  Santa 
Famiglia  with  clothes  drying  in  the  background." 
You  must  read  the  rest  of  this  peerless  note  for  your- 
self;  it  is  simply  wonderful,  but  too  long  to  give  in 
detail. 


VII 


But  it  is  on  the  subject  of  the  making  of  music, 
pictures  and  books  that  Butler  pleases  the  ordinary 
man  of  the  world  most.  Here  he  gives  us  the  most 
profound  thoughts  that  ever  emanated  from  his  mind 
and  we  get  more  clues  than  we  can  find  in  any  other 
literary  man's  work  that  I  can  for  the  moment  recollect, 
except,  perhaps,  Robert  Louis  Stevenson. 

"  What  we  should  read,"  he  says,  "  is  not  the 
words  but  the  man  whom  we  feel  to  be  behind  the 
words." 

Again  :  ' k  Words  are  like  money  :  there  is  nothing  so 
useless,  unless  when  in  actual  use.     Books  are  simple 


SAMUEL  BUTLER  197 

imprisoned  souls  until  someone  takes  them  down  from 
the  shelf  and  reads  them." 

He  says  that  the  same  rule  applies  to  the  making  of 
literature,  music  and  pictures ;  what  is  required  is 
that  the  artist  shall  say  or  depict  what  he  elects  to  say 
or  depict  discreetly  ;  that  he  shall  be  quick  to  see  the 
gist  of  a  matter  and  give  it  pithily  without  either 
prolixity  or  stint  of  words  .  .  .  the  fewest  words  or 
touches,  there  lies  the  secret  of  the  whole  business. 
Would  to  heaven  that  all  the  writers  and  painters  of 
my  acquaintance  would  follow  out  this  golden  advice. 

Shortly  after  this  we  come  upon  a  most  illuminating 
piece  of  advice :  "  I  have  always  found  compressing, 
cutting  out,  and  tersifying  a  passage  suggest  more  than 
anything  else  does.  Things  pruned  off  in  this  way  are 
like  the  heads  of  the  hydra,  two  grow  for  every  one  that 
is  lopped  off.  Brevity  is  not  only  the  soul  of  wit,  but 
the  soul  of  making  oneself  agreeable  and  of  getting 
on  with  people,  and  indeed  of  everything  that  makes 
life  worth  living." 

To  our  surprise  he  tells  us  to  let  the  main  work  slide 
when  a  number  of  small  things  remain  to  be  done,  just 
as  we  do  with  unpaid  bills.  If  we  attend  continually 
and  promptly  to  the  little  that  we  can  do,  we  shall  ere 
long  be  surprised  to  find  how  little  remains  that  we 
cannot  do.  "  The  rule  should  be  never  to  learn  a  thing 
till  one  is  pretty  sure  one  wants  it,"  he  says,  apropos 
of  knowledge  and  power.  "  There  are  plenty  of  things 
that  most  boys  would  give  their  ears  to  know,  these 
and  these  only  are  the  proper  things  for  them  to  sharpen 
their  wits  upon."  If  a  boy  is  idle  and  does  not  want 
to  learn  anything  at  all,  Butler  would  not  have  him 
flogged  into  learning  things  against  the  grain,  but 
rather  that  he  should  never  be  made  to  learn  anything 
till  it  is  pretty  obvious  that  he  cannot  get  on  without  it. 


198  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

In  conclusion  he  tells  us:  "Don't  learn  to  do,  but 
learn  in  doing  "  [this  is  only  the  apprenticeship  note 
amplified].  * '  Let  your  falls  not  be  on  a  prepared  ground, 
but  let  them  be  bona  fide  falls  in  the  rough  and  tumble 
of  the  world  ;  only,  of  course,  let  them  be  on  a  small 
scale  in  the  first  instance  till  you  feel  your  feet  safe 
under  you.  Act  more  and  rehearse  less.  Above  all, 
work  so  slowly  as  never  to  get  out  of  breath.  Take  it 
easy,  in  fact,  until  forced  not  to  do  so.  Do  not  hunt 
for  subjects,  let  them  choose  you,  not  you  them. 
Only  do  that  which  insists  upon  being  done  and  rims 
right  up  against  you,  hitting  you  in  the  eye  until  you 
do  it.  Till  called  in  this  way  do  nothing.5'  This  is 
invaluable  advice  to  all  young  writers  possessed  of 
feverish  energy  who  whip  themselves  into  action, 
however  flagging  their  spirit  is. 

One  of  Butler's  great  charms  is  this  potent  doctrine 
which  compels  you  to  act  on  his  advice  as  if  he  were 
some  great  Harley  Street  specialist.  It  is  only  what 
we  expect  to  find  when  we  read  that  Butler  is  here 
preaching  after  practising.  He  tells  us  that  he  never 
made  his  books  :  they  grew,  insisting  on  being  written  ; 
he  confesses  that  he  did  not  want  to  write  Erezvhon,  he 
wanted  to  go  on  with  his  painting ;  only  those  books 
live,  he  thinks,  that  have  drained  much  of  their  author's 
own  life  into  them.  The  personality  of  the  writer 
interests  us  far  more  than  his  work.  Everything  should 
be  read  aloud  as  soon  as  it  is  written  in  order  to  detect 
those  weak  places  which  when  read  to  oneself  are 
passed  over  as  all  right. 

Lastly,  the  audience  to  whom  one  should  address 
one's  thoughts  are  mainly  specialists  and  people 
between  twenty  and  thirty.  After  the  age  of  thirty, 
he  shrewdly  remarks,  only  a  few  men  and  women  read 
at  all. 


SAMUEL  BUTLER  199 

VIII 

The  next  note  is  on  Handel  and  Music.  From  boy- 
hood Butler  had  worshipped  Handel.  Even  so,  as  is 
so  typical  of  Butler,  he  admires  Handel  as  a  man  just 
as  he  admires  Shakespeare  as  a  man,  more  than  his 
work ;  behind  all  the  art  and  the  music  he  feels  the 
presence  of  the  great,  heroic  soul.  Perhaps  the  reason 
for  his  placing  him  above  Bach  and  Beethoven  can  be 
more  easily  understood  when  we  read  that  Handel  is 
so  great  and  so  simple  that  no  one  but  a  professional 
musician  is  unable  to  understand  him.  The  greatest 
men  do  not  go  over  the  heads  of  the  masses ;  they  take 
them  rather  by  the  hand.  Moreover,  and  this  makes 
a  tremendous  appeal  to  a  man  who  detested  shams, 
Handel  knew  when  to  stop,  and  when  he  meant  stopping 
he  stopped  much  as  a  horse  stops,  with  little,  if  any, 
peroration. 

Add  to  this  his  capacity  for  bringing  to  mind  a  fine 
piece  of  scenery  by  a  haunting  strain  and  you  have 
Handel's  genius  in  a  nutshell.  It  disgusted  Butler 
beyond  all  expression  to  think  that  we  buried  Dickens 
in  the  next  grave,  cheek-by-jowl  with  Handel.  Art, 
says  Butler,  and  this  applies  equally  to  Handel's  music 
and  all  great  writing  and  painting,  has  no  end  in  view 
save  the  emphasising  and  recording  in  the  most  effective 
way  some  strongly  felt  interest  or  affection.  Every- 
thing else  is  sham  art.  We  are  to  think  of  and  look 
at  our  work  as  though  it  were  done  by  our  enemy.  If 
we  look  at  it  to  admire  it  we  are  lost.  The  only  men 
who  go  on  improving  are  those  who  are  always  bona 
fide  dissatisfied  with  their  work. 

In  the  section  headed  "  The  Position  of  a  Homo  Unius 
Libri "  we  learn  more   interesting  details  of  Butler's 


200  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

own  life.  He  there  tells  us  his  aversion  from  the 
literary  and  scientific  giants  of  his  age.  "  If  I  was  to 
get  in  with  them  I  should  hate  them  and  they  me.  I 
should  fritter  away  my  time  and  my  freedom  without 
getting  a  quid  pro  quo  ;  as  it  is,  I  am  free  and  I  give  the 
swells  every  now  and  then  such  a  facer  as  they  get  from 
no  one  else  [It  might  be  the  voice  of  Bernard  Shaw 
himself  speaking] ;  I  know  that  I  don't  go  the  right 
way  to  get  on  in  a  commercial  sense,  but  I  am  going 
the  right  way  to  secure  a  lasting  reputation  and  that 
is  what  I  really  care  for.  I  have  gone  in  for  posthumous 
fame  only,  and  that  I  believe  I  shall  secure." 

When  he  had  written  Erewhon  people  immediately 
implored  him  to  set  to  work  at  once  and  write  another 
book  like  it,  Nothing,  he  says,  is  so  cruel  as  to  try  and 
force  a  man  beyond  his  natural  power ;  if  he  has  got 
more  stuff  in  him  it  will  come  out  in  its  own  time  and 
in  its  own  way.  The  more  promise  a  young  writer  has 
given,  the  more  his  friends  should  urge  him  not  to  over- 
tax himself.  He  lost  apparently  over  £750  on  his 
books,  and  gives  as  a  reason  the  fact  that  he  attacked 
people  who  were  at  once  unscrupulous  and  powerful 
and  made  no  alliances.  His  own  age  would  not  tolerate 
him  because  he  attacked  two  powerful  sets  of  vested 
interests  at  once — the  Church  and  Science.  It  is 
better,  he  concludes,  to  write  fearlessly  for  posterity, 
if  you  can  afford  to,  than  to  write  like  George  Eliot 
and  make  a  lot  of  money  by  it.  As  to  being  adequately 
paid,  however,  he  says,  who  can  say,  when  we  realise 
how  much  we  inherit  from  past  generations  and  all  that 
now  makes  life  worth  living,  London,  with  its  sources 
of  pleasure  and  amusement,  good  theatres,  concerts, 
picture  galleries,  the  British  Museum  Reading  Room, 
newspapers,  a  comfortable  dwelling,  railways,  and, 
above  all,  the  society  of  friends  we  value.     In  the  note 


SAMUEL  BUTLER  201 

which  follows  this  on  Cash  and  Credit  we  hear  more 
about  the  requirements  of  the  true  writer.  Emphasis- 
ing again  the  need  for  brevity  and  clarity  (Butler 
never  tires  of  reiterating  the  importance  of  these 
qualities)  he  proceeds  to  point  out  the  necessity  for 
honesty.  Whether  a  book  will  personally  do  him  good 
or  harm  should  never  be  allowed  to  weigh  at  all  with 
a  writer ;  he  only  is  the  genuine  man  of  letters  who 
lives  in  fear  and  trembling  lest  he  should  fail  in  respect 
of  keeping  his  good  name  spotless  among  those  whose 
opinion  he  values  (this  sounds  like  Milton  ;  more  and 
more  am  I  inclined  to  think  that  Butler,  like  Shaw,  will 
in  the  end  be  placed  among  the  great  Puritans  of 
English  writers),  who  never  writes  without  thinking 
how  he  shall  best  serve  good  causes  and  damage  bad 
ones.  Such  work  is  done  as  a  bird  sings — for  the  love 
of  it — it  is  persevered  in  as  long  as  body  and  soul  can 
be  kept  together  without  thought  or  hope  of  pecuniary 
reward.  As  soon  as  any  art  is  pursued  with  a  view 
to  money,  then  farewell  all  hope  of  genuine  good  work. 
There  is  a  certain  sort  of  person  very  commonly  to  be 
found  among  those  who  despise  all  art,  who  asks,  when 
he  sees  a  great  picture,  reads  a  fine  poem,  or  hears  a 
rich  sonata  or  oratorio:  "Well,  this  is  all  very  well, 
but  what  useful  purpose  does  it  serve  ?  "  And  we 
are  in  nine  cases  out  of  ten  hard  put  to  it  to  answer  in 
such  a  way  as  to  make  our  opponent  understand. 

It  is  refreshing  to  listen  to  Butler  on  this  vexed 
question  :  "  When  I  look  at  those  works  which  we  all 
hold  to  be  the  crowning  glories  of  the  world,  as,  for 
example,  the  Iliad,  the  Odyssey,  Hamlet,  The  Messiah, 
Rembrandt's  portraits,  or  Holbein's,  or  Giovanni 
Bellini's  [it  sheds  not  a  little  light  on  Butler's  personality 
to  go  carefully  through  this  list]  the  connection  between 
them  and  use  is,  to  say  the  least  of  it,  far  from  obvious. 


202  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

Music,  indeed,  can  hardly  be  tortured  into  being  useful 
at  all,  unless  to  drown  the  cries  of  the  wounded  in 
battle,  or  to  enable  people  to  talk  more  freely  at 
evening  parties.  The  uses  of  painting,  materially 
speaking,  are  again  very  doubtful ;  and  literature 
may  be  useful  until  it  reaches  its  highest  point,  but  the 
highest  cannot  be  put  in  harness  to  any  but  spiritual 
uses.  So  we  conclude  that  it  is  fatal  to  the  highest  art 
that  it  should  be  done  with  a  view  to  those  uses  that 
tend  towards  money." 

As  so  many  great  writers  have  endeavoured  to  define 
that  indefinable  will-o'-the-wisp  word  Genius,  we  are 
all  the  more  delighted  to  get  still  a  different  facet 
shown  us  by  Butler.  Everyone,  he  says,  has  more  or 
less  genius — that  is  to  say,  everyone  has  more  or  less 
madness  and  inspiration — but  it  is  the  small  excess 
weight  of  it  that  carries  a  man  over  the  border.  It  is, 
he  says,  exquisitely  parodying  Carlyle,  the  supreme 
capacity  for  getting  its  possessors  into  trouble  of  all 
kinds  and  keeping  them  therein  so  long  as  the  genius 
remains.  It  is  a  mistake  to  suppose  that  men  possessed 
of  this  spirit  are  always  painstaking ;  sometimes  if  they 
had  been  less  so  they  would  have  been  greater  geniuses. 

Pains  can  serve  it  or  even  mar  it,  but  they  cannot 
make  it.  Perhaps  an  even  better  definition  would  be 
that  genius  is  the  supreme  capacity  for  saving  other 
people  from  having  to  take  pains,  if  the  highest  flights 
of  genius  did  not  seem  to  know  nothing  about  pains 
one  way  or  the  other.  Genius  points  to  change,  and 
change  is  a  hankering  after  another  world,  so  the  old 
world  suspects  it  as  subversive  of  order,  unsettling  to 
our  mores  and  hence  immoral. 

But  you  must  be  careful  here  to  take  Butler's  con- 
notation of  morality.  Absolute  morality,  it  follows 
from   the  above,  is  absolute  stagnation  and  death — 


SAMUEL  BUTLER  203 

hence  immorality,  in  his  sense,  is  not  only  necessary 
but  beneficial — a  synonym  for  all  progress.  And  this 
in  Butler's  view  is  genius,  the  curious  elusive  faculty 
which  so  despises  the  world,  of  which  the  world  is  so 
permanently  enamoured,  and  the  more  it  flouts  it 
the  more  the  world  worships  it,  when  it  has  once  well 
killed  it  in  the  flesh.  As  it  cannot  be  bought  with 
money  so  it  still  less  can  sell  what  it  produces.  The 
only  price  that  we  can  pay  for  it  is  suffering,  and  this 
is  the  only  wages  it  can  receive. 

Genius  and  common-sense  are  like  wife  and  husband, 
always  quarrelling,  and  the  latter  always  imagining 
himself  to  be  master  while  in  reality  genius  is  by  far  the 
better  half.  Dullness  is  much  stronger  than  genius 
because  there  is  so  much  more  of  it  —  an  Arctic 
volcano  can  do  nothing  against  Arctic  ice,  as  Butler 
beautifully  expresses  it.  He  sums  up  in  a  nutshell  the 
difference  between  ephemeral  and  permanent  success 
by  the  epigram  that  independence  is  essential  for  the 
latter  but  fatal  to  immediate  prosperity. 


IX 


It  would  be  hard  to  find  so  much  wisdom  in  any  other 
six  volumes  as  is  contained  in  the  few  notes,  the  essence 
of  which  I  have  tried  to  convey  in  the  last  section.  In 
section  twelve  we  are  brought  near  to  the  man  himself, 
"  The  Enfant  Terrible  of  Literature."  "  If  I  cannot," 
he  begins,  "  and  I  know  I  cannot,  get  the  literary  and 
scientific  big  wigs  to  give  me  a  shilling,  I  can,  and  I 
know  I  can,  heave  bricks  into  the  middle  of  them." 
He  immediately  heaves  a  big  one  at  the  literary  critics 
of  his  day.  "  Talking  it  over,  we  agreed  that  Blake 
was  no  good  because  he  learnt  Italian  at  sixty  in  order 


204  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

to  study  Dante,  and  we  knew  Dante  was  no  good  because 
he  was  so  fond  of  Virgil,  and  Virgil  was  no  good  because 
Tennyson  ran  him,  and  as  for  Tennyson — well,  Tennyson 
goes  without  saying." 

I  should  like  to  have  been  in  the  Athenaeum  Club 
with  the  bishops  and  headmasters  and  antique,  well- 
groomed  critics  when  that  note  was  first  published, 
and  read  it  out  loud  to  as  large  an  audience  as  I  could 
have  gathered  round  me  and  then  got  Herkomer  and 
Augustus  John  to  paint  their  faces :  another  thing  I 
have  missed  by  being  born  too  late.  For  years  we 
nourish  within  our  own  minds  our  secret  dissatisfaction 
with  poets  who  have  been  thrust  down  our  throats  as 
divine,  never  daring  to  contradict  our  elders,  and  here 
is  a  man  old  enough  to  be  our  great-grandfather  who 
openly  propagated  his  opinion  fearlessly  years  before 
we  were  born.     What  cowards  we  are  ! 

He  then  goes  on  to  throw  bricks  into  the  rose-garden 
of  the  Victorian  prose- writers.  "  Mr  Walter  Pater's 
style  is  to  me  like  the  face  of  some  old  woman  who 
has  had  herself  enamelled.  The  bloom  is  nothing  but 
powder  and  paint,  and  the  odour  is  cherry-blossom. 
Matthew  Arnold's  odour  is  as  the  faint  sickliness  of 
hawthorn."  No  one  who  reads  that  will  ever  be  able 
to  read  either  of  these  stylists  without  recalling  these 
amazingly  perfect  similes.  What  consternation  they 
must  have  caused  in  the  academic  circles  of  his  day  : 
how  good  for  the  undergraduate  bookworm  of  the  day 
to  have  been  compelled  to  write  his  essays  from 
Butler's  Notebooks. 

It  is  at  this  point  that  Butler  makes  his  general 
confession. 

"  I  have  left  unsaid  much  that  I  am  sorry  I  did  not 
say,  but  I  have  said  little  that  I  am  sorry  for  having 
said,  and  I  am  pretty  well  on  the  whole,  thank  you." 


SAMUEL  BUTLER  205 

On  the  question  of  style  we  learn  more  in  a  para- 
graph of  Butler's  than  from  whole  books  of  better- 
known  men. 

"  I  never  knew  a  writer  yet  who  took  the  smallest 
pains  with  his  style  and  was  at  the  same  time  readable. 
Plato's  having  had  seventy  shies  at  one  sentence  is 
quite  enough  to  explain  to  me  why  I  dislike  him.  A 
man  may,  and  ought  to  take  a  great  deal  of  pains  to 
write  clearly,  tersely  and  euphemistically  :  he  will  write 
many  a  sentence  three  or  four  times  over — to  do  much 
more  than  this  is  worse  than  not  re-writing  at  all  : 
he  will  be  at  great  pains  to  see  that  he  does  not  repeat 
himself,  to  arrange  his  matter  in  the  way  that  shall 
best  enable  the  reader  to  master  it,  or  cut  out  super- 
fluous words,  and  even  more,  to  eschew  irrelevant 
matter  :  but  in  each  case  he  will  be  thinking  not  of  his 
own  style  but  of  his  reader's  convenience.  I  do  not 
know  whether  I  have  a  style  or  not :  What  I  believe 
and  hope  I  have  is  just  common,  simple  straight- 
forwardness. More  than  this  is  a  loss  to  yourself 
and  your  readers." 

Incidentally  it  does  seem  to  occur  to  him  that  he 
may  have  been  begging  the  question,  for  after  all 
is  not  this  a  definition  of  style — and  a  counsel  of 
perfection  at  that  ?  Butler  almost  confesses  so  immedi- 
ately after.  In  fact,  he  sums  up  his  point  of  view  and 
clinches  the  argument  finally  in  another  passage  in 
an  earlier  portion  of  the  book  :  "A  man's  style  should 
be  like  his  clothes,  neat,  well-cut  and  such  as  not  to 
call  any  attention  to  him  at  all." 

He  returns  immediately  to  his  criticism  of  authors. 
He  finds  The  Pilgrim's  Progress  an  infamous  libel  on 
life  and  things,  a  blasphemy  against  the  fundamental 
ideas  of  right  and  wrong  ;  its  heaven  is  essentially 
infidel,  a  transformation  scene  at  Drury  Lane.     "  'No 


206  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

crown,  no  cross  for  me'  is  the  bargaining,  Jewish 
spirit  that  pervades  it.  There  is  no  conception  of  the 
faith  that  a  man  should  do  his  duty  cheerfully,  with 
all  his  might,  though  he  will  never  be  paid  directly  or 
indirectly.  Still  less  is  there  any  conception  that 
unless  a  man  has  this  faith  he  is  not  worth  thinking 
about."  No  wonder  Butler  abandoned  the  thought  of 
taking  Holy  Orders.  Like  nearly  all  other  iconoclasts, 
like  Shelley  especially,  he  was  angry  at  a  world  which 
refused  to  smash  a  half-and-half  religion  and  demand 
for  itself  one  nearer  to  its  heart's  best  desire.  "  What 
a  pity  it  is/'  he  continues,  "  that  Christian  never  met 
Mr  Common-sense  with  his  daughter  Good-Humour, 
and  her  affianced  husband,  Mr  Hate-Cant." 

It  is  in  this  note  that  we  learn  of  Butler's  love  for 
Swift,  "  a  far  more  human  and  genuine  person  than  he 
is  generally  represented,"  and,  strangely  enough,  his 
dislike  of  Fielding. 

Probably  he  was  too  much  of  a  Puritan  to  relish  the 
full-blooded  canvas  of  the  eighteenth-century  novelist. 
He  then  generalises  by  pointing  out  what  we  have  all 
of  us  thought,  but  no  one,  so  far  as  I  know,  has  ever  yet 
expressed  : 

"  The  highest  poetry  is  ineffable — it  must  be  felt 
from  one  person  to  another,  it  cannot  be  articulated." 

Apro]oos  of  versifying  he  says  that  the  last  thing  a 
great  poet  will  do  in  these  days  is  to  write  verses.  He 
finds  Venus  and  Adonis  and  The  Rape  of  Lucrece 
fatiguing  to  read ;  "  They  teem  with  good  things,  but 
they  are  got-up  fine  things."  He  consideres  that  a 
sonnet  is  the  utmost  length  to  which  any  rhymed 
poem  should  extend.  He  certainly  here,  as  everywhere 
else,  practises  what  he  preaches.  I  can  for  the  moment 
recollect  no  genius  so  steadfastly  consistent  as  Samuel 
Butler  was,  which  is  another  proof  of  the  likelihood  of 


SAMUEL  BUTLER  207 

my  theory  that  he  was  strictly  a  Puritan  at  heart : 
he  had  all  the  best  qualities  of  that  abused  sect.  Lest 
we  should  mistake  his  attitude  to  Bunyan  from  his 
foregoing  remarks,  he  tells  us  that  the  Preface  to  The 
Pilgrim's  Progress  is  verse  but  not  poetry,  while  the 
body  of  the  book  is  poetry  but  not  verse. 

On  Homer  we  expect  to  find  Butler  at  his  best, 
knowing  as  we  do  his  immense  affection  for  the  Iliad 
and  the  Odyssey.  With  regard  to  translation  he  says 
that  if  you  wish  to  preserve  the  spirit  of  a  dead  author 
you  must  not  skin  him,  stuff  him  and  set  him  up  in  a 
case.  You  must  eat  him,  digest  him  and  let  him  live 
in  you,  with  such  life  as  you  have,  for  better  or  worse. 
The  difference  between  the  Andrew  Lang  manner  of 
translating  the  Odyssey  and  his  own  he  compares  to 
the  difference  between  making  a  mummy  and  a  baby. 
Lang  tries  to  preserve  a  corpse,  while  Butler  tries  to 
originate  a  new  life,  one  instinct  with  the  spirit  though 
not  the  form  of  the  original.  The  only  person  who 
could  ever  really  translate  the  poem  adequately,  he 
believes,  would  be  some  high-spirited  English  girl  who 
had  been  brought  up  in  Athens  and  therefore  not  been 
jaded  by  academic  study  of  the  language. 


It  is  with  a  peculiar  sense  of  anticipation  that  we 
turn  to  "  Unprofessional  Sermons  "  and  read  Butler's 
commentary  on  the  superior  ideals  of  the  Greeks  and 
Romans  over  the  Jews.  On  the  subject  of  Hebraic 
literature  he  is,  as  usual,  fresh,  satirical  and  vivid. 
He  picks  out  The  Song  of  Solomon  and  the  Book  of 
Esther  as  the  most  interesting  in  the  Old  Testament, 
but  adds  that  these  are  the  very  ones  that  make  the 


208  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

least  pretensions  to  holiness  and  neither  of  them  of 
transcendent  merit.  t;  They  would  stand  no  chance  of 
being  accepted  by  Messrs  Cassell  &  Co.  or  by  any 
biblical  publisher  of  the  present  day.  Chatto  & 
Windus  might  take  The  Song  of  Solomon  but,  with  this 
exception,  I  doubt  if  there  is  a  publisher  in  London  who 
would  give  a  guinea  for  the  pair.  Ecclesiastes  contains 
some  fine  things  but  is  strongly  tinged  with  pessimism, 
cynicism  and  affectation  ;  the  Psalms  generally  are 
poor,  and  for  the  most  part  querulous,  spiteful  and 
introspective.  Mudie  would  not  take  thirteen  copies 
of  the  lot  if  they  were  to  appear  now  for  the  first  time, 
unless  their  royal  authorship  were  to  arouse  an  adven- 
titious interest  in  them.  As  for  the  prophets,  well, 
they  will  not  hold  their  own  against  The  Pilgrim's 
Progress,  Robinson  Crusoe,  Gulliver's  Travels,  and  Tom 
Jones.  Whether  there  be  prophecies,  says  the  Apostle, 
they  shall  fail.  On  the  whole  I  should  say  that  Isaiah 
and  Jeremiah  must  be  held  to  have  failed."  To-day 
we  can  read  this  without  a  tremor.  Nay,  more,  most 
of  us  can  cordially  agree,  but  think  of  the  effect  of  such 
criticism,  blasphemy  they  would  have  called  it,  on  our 
fathers  !  He  finds  the  wisest  text  in  the  Bible  in  : 
"  Be  not  righteous  over  much ;  neither  make  thyself 
over  wise  :  why  shouldest  thou  destroy  thyself  ?  Be 
not  over  much  wicked,  neither  be  thou  foolish  :  why 
shouldest  thou  die  before  thy  time  ?  "  On  the  subject  of 
knowing  what  gives  us  pleasure  he  quotes  from  his  great 
namesake,  not  once  nor  twice:  "Surely  the  pleasure 
is  as  great  of  being  cheated  as  to  cheat."  So  long  as 
there  is  discomfort  somewhere  it  is  all  right.  Of 
prayer  he  says  that  prayers  are  to  men  as  dolls  are  to 
children  :  it  is  not  easy  to  take  them  very  seriously. 
In  the  chapter  labelled  "  Higgledy-Piggledy  "  we  get 
a  potpourri  or  hotchpotch  of  good  things,  none  of  them 


SAMUEL  BUTLER  209 

without  value,  many  of  them  never  to  be  forgotten 
once  they  are  read.  He  writes  of  his  notes  here  that 
they  were  not  meant  for  publication.  The  bad  ones 
were  to  serve  as  bread  for  the  jam  of  the  good  ones. 
Certainly  there  is  little  except  jam  at  any  rate  in  this 
part  of  the  book.  Witness  such  an  excellent  piece  of 
advice  as  :  "It  does  not  matter  much  what  a  man  hates 
so  long  as  he  hates  something." 

In  an  apology  for  the  devil  he  tells  us  to  remember 
that  it  must  be  remembered  that  we  have  only  heard 
one  side  of  the  case.     God  has  written  all  the  books. 

With  regard  to  the  time  in  which  we  now  live  it  does 
us  good  to  think  that  everything  matters  more  than  we 
think  it  does,  and  at  the  same  time  nothing  matters  so 
much  as  we  think  it  does.  The  merest  spark  may  set 
all  Europe  in  a  blaze,  but  though  all  Europe  be  set  in 
a  blaze  twenty  times  over,  the  world  will  wag  itself 
right  again.  It  is  important  to  those  of  us  who  want 
to  gain  a  full  picture  of  the  man  to  realise  that  Nature 
not  only  meant  to  him  mountain,  rivers,  clouds  and 
undomesticated  animals  and  plants  but  also — and  much 
more — the  works  of  man  and  man  himself.  Return- 
ing to  the  subject  of  Providence,  he  tells  us  that  to  put 
one's  trust  in  God  is  only  a  longer  way  of  saying  that 
one  will  chance  it,  and  as  to  Providence  himself,  if  he 
could  be  seen  at  all,  he  would  probably  turn  out  to 
be  a  most  disappointing  person — a  little  wizened  old 
gentleman  with  a  cold  in  his  head,  wandering  aimlessly 
about  the  streets,  poking  his  way  about  and  loitering 
continually  at  shop  windows  and  second-hand  book- 
stalls. 

To  understand  a  proposition  thoroughly,  in  Butler's 
words,  we  must  put  it  on  its  head  and  shake  it  like  a 
purse,  and  we  shall  then  be  surprised  to  find  how  much 
comes  out  of  it. 


210  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

Often  we  find  that  Butler  expresses  something  we 
have  frequently  thought  but  never  been  able  to  put 
into  words.  An  illustration  of  this  may  be  found  in  his 
note  on  that  psalm  in  which  David  says  that  he  has 
more  understanding  than  his  teachers.  "  If  his  teachers 
were  anything  like  mine,"  says  Butler,  "  this  need  not 
imply  much  understanding  on  David's  part.  And  if 
his  teachers  did  not  know  more  than  the  Psalms  .  .  . 
Heaven  help  them." 

On  the  top  of  this  comes  one  of  the  most  poignantly 
truthful  and  wise  remarks  he  ever  penned  :  "To  live 
is  like  to  love — all  reason  is  against  it — all  healthy 
instinct  for  it." 

It  is  surp rising  to  read  immediately  after  this,  from 
so  stern  an  ascetic,  that  he  had  come  to  the  conclusion 
that  life  is,  au  fond,  sensual,  say  what  we  will.  This 
utterance  must  have  been  forced  out  of  him  by  that 
undeviating  power  to  state  at  all  costs  the  truth  and 
nothing  but  the  truth,  but  it  must  have  been  a  harder 
saying  to  him  than  almost  anything  else  he  ever  wrote. 
The  courage  of  the  rigid  Puritan  who  refused  to  sell  his 
eyes  however  much  the  truth  hurt  him  is  one  of  the 
finest  things  in  all  modern  literature.  The  next  note 
may,  to  a  certain  extent,  explain  this  a  little  more 
clearly.     It  is  called  Women  and  Religion. 

"  It  has  been  said  that  all  sensible  men  are  of  the 
same  religion  and  that  no  sensible  man  ever  says  what 
that  religion  is.  So  all  sensible  men  are  of  the  same 
opinion  about  women  and  no  sensible  man  ever  says 
what  that  opinion  is." 

He  concludes  the  Higgledy-Piggledy  section  by  a 
note  which  is  never  out  of  my  mind  when  I  stand  on 
a  platform  saying  good-bye  to  some  loved  friend  who 
is  leaving  me  alone  and  miserable :  "I  can  generally 
bear  the  separation,  but  I  don't  like  the  leave-taking." 


SAMUEL  BUTLER  211 

What  a  world  of  feeling  is  contained  in  that  cold,  steel- 
like aphorism !  Shakespeare  never  got  nearer  to  a 
universal  truth  than  Butler  does  in  those  twelve  short 
words. 

In  the  section  on  Titles  and  Subjects  we  get  some 
glimmering  idea  of  what  we  have  missed  owing  to 
Butler's  squanderings.  What  a  book  he  would  have 
made  of  Tracts  for  Children,  warning  them  against  the 
Virtues  of  their  Elders  or  The  Elements  of  Immorality, 
for  the  Use  of  Earnest  Schoolmasters. 

What  we  would  not  give  to  be  able  to  read  his  novel 
about  a  freethinking  father  who  has  an  illegitimate 
son,  which  he  considers  the  proper  thing  ;  he  finds  this 
son  takes  to  immoral  ways — e.g.  he  turns  Christian, 
becomes  a  clergyman,  and  insists  on  marrying. 

How  ably  he  would  have  edited  the  letters  of  people 
who  have  committed  suicide  together  with  those  of 
people  who  only  threaten  to  do  so. 

We  get  an  insight  into  Butler's  own  mode  of  life 
from  his  simile  of  the  cow.  "  A  man,  finding  himself 
in  the  field  of  a  profession  should  do  as  cows  do  when 
they  are  put  into  a  field  of  grass.  They  do  not  like 
any  field  :  they  like  the  open  prairie  of  their  ancestors. 
They  walk,  however,  all  round  their  new  abode,  survey- 
ing the  hedges  and  gates  with  much  interest.  If  there 
is  a  gap  in  any  hedge  they  will  commonly  go  through 
it  at  once,  otherwise  they  will  resign  themselves  con- 
tentedly enough  to  the  task  of  feeding." 

It  is  with  a  discontented,  wretched  feeling  that  we 
never  have  taken  the  trouble  to  explore  our  gaps  that 
we  close  a  volume  of  Butler :  he  at  least  was  filled 
eternally  with  that  divine  Wander-Lust  which  is  the 
germ  of  all  progress  and  without  which  no  great  work 
can  be  done  or  immortal  fame  earned.  Butler  at  least 
has  this  great  advantage  :   he  never  leaves  you  where 


212  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

he  found  you  ;  he  points  the  way  to  the  gaps  and  gates 
which  we  had  been  too  slack  or  too  busy  grazing  to 
notice  for  ourselves,  and  few  indeed  ought  to  be  those 
who,  inspired  by  his  example,  fail  to  explore  the  country 
that  lies  beyond  the  calm,  monotonous  meadowland 
of  our  ordinary  vocation. 


XI 


It  is  in  the  chapter  on  First  Principles  that  he 
recounts  for  our  benefit  that  inimitable  story  of  the 
freethinker  who  exclaimed  :  "I  am  an  atheist,  thank 
God  !  "  which  runs  close  to  being  the  best  short  anecdote 
in  the  world. 

With  regard  to  his  readers  he  says  :  "  It  is  the 
manner  of  gods  and  prophets  to  begin  :  Thou  shalt 
have  none  other  god  or  prophet  but  me.  If  I  were  to 
start  as  a  god  or  a  prophet  I  think  I  should  take  the 
line :  Thou  shalt  not  believe  in  me.  Thou  shalt  not 
have  me  for  a  god.  Thou  shalt  worship  any  damned 
thing  thou  likest  except  me.  This  should  be  my  first 
and  great  commandment  and  my  second  should  be  like 
unto  it.  If  my  readers  must  believe  in  anything,  let 
them  believe  in  the  music  of  Handel,  the  painting  of 
Giovanni  Bellini,  and  in  the  thirteenth  chapter  of  St 
Paul's  First  Epistle  to  the  Corinthians. 

"  It  is  not  the  church  in  the  village  that  is  the  source 
of  mischief,  but  the  rectory.  I  would  not  touch  a 
church  from  one  end  of  England  to  the  other."  It 
almost  recalls  the  Bacon-Shakespeare  controversy  to 
read,  apropos  of  theist  and  atheist,  that  the  fight 
between  them  is  as  to  whether  God  shall  be  called 
God  or  shall  have  some  other  name. 

This  section  on  Rebelliousness  is  full  of  carping  at 


SAMUEL  BUTLER  213 

orthodox  Christianity.  "  As  there  is  a  peace  more 
comfortable  than  any  understanding,  so  there  is  an 
understanding  more  covetable  than  any  peace,"  which 
is  a  point  of  view  never  before  put  into  words,  but  no 
less  true  in  every  whit  than  the  more  famous  words  of 
the  collect  from  which  Butler  found  the  origin  of  his 
note. 

When  Butler  gets  on  to  the  subject  of  cant  and 
hypocrisy  we  see  more  clearly  than  ever  the  legiti- 
mate line  between  Swift  and  Shaw.  "  Gratitude  like 
revenge,"  he  opens,  "  is  a  mistake  unless  under  certain 
securities.  We  have  organised  a  legitimate  channel 
for  lust  and  revenge  by  the  institution  of  marriage  and 
the  law  courts. 

"  So  it  is  with  the  professions  of  religion  and  medicine. 
You  swindle  a  man  as  much  when  you  sell  him  a  drug 
of  whose  action  you  are  ignorant  as  when  you  give  him 
a  bit  of  bread  and  assure  him  that  it  is  the  body  of  His 
Lord  and  then  send  a  plate  round  for  a  subscription." 
This  passage,  unpalatable  as  it  may  be,  is  simply  a 
transcript  from  A  Tale  of  a  Tub,  written  even  more 
concisely  and  straightforwardly  than  Jonathan  Swift 
wrote.  It  is  inevitable  that  a  man  who  writes  so  fear- 
lessly as  Butler  should  be  frequently  misquoted  by  his 
opponents,  and  on  the  subject  of  drunkenness  it  has 
often  been  adduced  against  him  that  he  advocated  it. 

What  he  actually  said  was  that  in  spite  of  his  hating 
drunkenness  he  was  convinced  that  the  human  intellect 
owed  its  superiority  over  that  of  the  lower  animals 
to  the  stimulus  which  alcohol  gives  to  the  imagina- 
tion or  illusion,  which  is  a  quite  different  thing  and 
undeniably  true. 

After  having  listened  to  innumerable  persons  hope- 
lessly entangling  themselves  in  their  endeavour  to 
explain  the  sin  against  the  Holy  Ghost,  it  is  an  immense 


214  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

relief  to  turn  to  a  wise  man  like  Butler  and  read  his 
rendering  of  the  meaning  of  this  difficult  passage. 

"  What  Christ  meant  was  that  a  man  may  be 
pardoned  for  being  unable  to  believe  in  the  Christian 
mythology,  but  that  if  he  made  light  of  that  spirit 
which  the  common  conscience  of  all  men.  whatever 
their  particular  creed,  recognises  as  divine  there  was 
no  hope  for  him.     No  more  there  is." 

And  yet,  in  spite  of  this  note,  there  are  men  and 
women  who  maintain  that  Butler  is  an  atheist,  a 
blasphemer  and  a  blackguard.  What  a  crime  it  is  in 
England  to  possess  an  organic  mind  and  dare  to  follow 
St  Paul's  advice  about  proving  all  things  before  you 
accept  any. 

As  he  himself  explains,  he  does  not  fall  foul  of 
Christians  and  their  religion,  but  for  what  he  held  to  be 
their  want  of  religion,  for  the  low  views  they  take  of 
God  and  of  His  glory  and  for  the  unworthiness  with 
which  they  try  to  serve  Him. 

"  When  I  was  young,"  he  continues,  "  I  used  to 
think  that  the  only  certain  thing  about  life  was  that 
I  should  one  day  die.  Now  I  think  that  the  only 
certain  thing  about  life  is  that  there  is  no  such  thing 
as  death."  If  this  is  not  the  utterance  of  a  truly 
devout  man,  I  have  still  to  learn  what  devout  means. 

In  "  The  Life  of  the  World  to  Come,"  of  all  strange 
places,  we  hit  upon  another  introspective,  personal 
touch  about  himself,  which  is,  after  all,  our  main  object 
of  search.  "  I  do  not  read  much,"  he  says.  "  I  look, 
listen,  think  and  write.  I  note  what  my  friends  say, 
think  it  over,  adapt  it  and  give  it  permanent  form. 
They  throw  good  things  off  as  sparks ;  I  collect  them 
and  turn  them  into  warmth." 

Talking  of  fictional  characters  (quaintly  enough,  in 
the  same  note)  he  points  out  what  Spender  noticed  in 


SAMUEL  BUTLER  215 

his  comments  of  Bagshot,  that  bravery,  wit  and  poetry 
abound  in  every  village.  "  There  is  not  a  village  of 
five  hundred  inhabitants  in  England  but  has  its  Mrs 
Quickly  and  Tom  Jones.  These  good  people  never 
understand  themselves,  they  go  over  their  own  heads, 
they  speak  in  unknown  tongues  to  those  around  them, 
and  the  interpreter  is  the  rarer  and  more  important 
person.  The  votes  sacer  is  the  middleman  of  mind." 
This  section  is  a  weird  medley  of  inconsequent  notes, 
but  none  the  less  invaluable  on  that  account.  It  is  here 
that  we  come  upon  that  splendid  note  on  "  My  Son," 
which  no  one  but  Butler  could  ever  have  imagined, 
much  less  written. 

"  I  have  often  told  my  son  that  he  must  begin  by 
finding  me  a  wife  to  become  his  mother,  who  shall 
satisfy  both  himself  and  me.  We  should  never  have 
got  on  together :  I  should  have  had  to  cut  him  off  with 
a  shilling  either  for  laughing  at  Homer,  or  for  refusing 
to  laugh  at  him,  or  both,  or  neither.  So  I  settled  the 
matter  long  ago  by  turning  a  deaf  ear  to  his  impor- 
tunities and  sticking  to  it  that  I  would  not  get  him  at 
all.  Yet  his  thin  ghost  visits  me  at  times  and  though 
he  knows  that  it  is  no  use  pestering  me  further,  he  looks 
at  me  so  wistfully  and  reproachfully  that  I  am  half- 
inclined  to  turn  tail,  take  my  chance  about  his  mother 
and  ask  him  to  let  me  get  him  after  all.  But  I  should 
show  a  clean  pair  of  heels  if  I  said  '  Yes.'  Besides,  he 
would  probably  be  a  girl." 

Now  ask  yourself  candidly  and  honestly,  is  not  this 
more  satisfying,  truer  and  more  pregnant  with  pathos 
than  Lamb's  Dream-Children  ?  Of  course  it  is.  It 
might  also  be  made  the  touchstone  on  which  you  can 
test  your  appreciation  of  Butler.  If  this  passage  leaves 
you  cold,  go  back  to  your  Tennyson ;  Butler  is  not 
for  you.     If,  however,  you  are  among  that  quickly 


216  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

increasing  colony  of  Erewhon  lovers  you  will  only  read 
on  feverishly — and  as  a  result  be  brought  up  sharp 
by  one  of  those  astringent  surprises  which  Butler 
delights  to  keep  in  store  for  some  such  moment  as  this 
by  meeting  a  page  of  statistics  about  the  sale  of  his 
works. 

Apparently  he  lost  money  on  every  book  he  wrote 
except  Erewhon,  increasing  his  debit  account  from  £350 
to  close  on  £800.  On  the  opposite  page  to  this  in- 
teresting list  of  book-keeping  we  read  :  "  If  I  deserve 
to  be  remembered,  it  will  not  be  so  much  for  anything 
I  have  written,  or  for  any  new  way  of  looking  at  old 
facts  as  for  having  shown  that  a  man  of  no  special 
ability,  with  no  literary  connections,  not  particularly 
laborious,  fairly,  but  not  supremely,  accurate  as  far  as 
he  goes,  may  yet,  by  being  perfectly  square,  sticking  to 
his  point,  not  letting  his  temper  run  away  with  him, 
and  biding  his  time,  be  a  match  for  the  most  powerful 
literary  and  scientific  coterie  that  England  has  ever 
known.  I  hope  it  may  be  said  of  me  that  I  discomfited 
an  unscrupulous,  self-seeking  clique,  and  set  a  more 
wholesome  example  myself.  To  have  done  this  is  the 
best  of  all  discoveries. 

"  I  am  not  one  of  those  who  have  travelled  along 
a  set  road  towards  an  end  that  I  have  foreseen  and 
desired  to  reach.  I  have  made  a  succession  of  jaunts 
or  pleasure  trips  from  meadow  to  meadow.  Neverthe- 
less I  have  strayed  into  no  field  in  which  I  have  not 
found  a  flower  that  was  worth  the  finding." 

He  then  catalogues  the  seventeen  different  things  that 
he  has  left  for  the  world  to  judge  him  by.  among  the  most 
important  being  the  emphasising  the  analogies  between 
crime  and  disease,  the  emphasising  the  analogies  between 
the  development  of  the  organs  of  our  bodies  and  those 
which  are  not  incorporate  with  our  bodies  and  which 


SAMUEL  BUTLER  217 

we  call  tools  or  machines,  the  clearing  up  the  history 
of  the  events  in  connection  with  the  crucifixion  of  Our 
Lord,  the  perception  that  personal  identity  cannot  be 
denied  between  parents  and  offspring  without  denying 
it  as  between  the  different  ages  and  moments  in  the 
life  of  the  individual,  the  exposure  of  Charles  Darwin 
and  Wallace,  the  perception  of  the  principle  that  led 
organic  life  to  split  up  into  animal  and  vegetable,  the 
perception  that  if  the  Kinetic  theory  holds  good,  our 
thought  of  a  thing  is  in  reality  an  exceedingly  weak 
dilution  of  the  actual  thing  itself,  the  finding  out  that 
the  Odyssey  was  written  at  Trapani  by  a  woman,  and 
the  elucidation  of  Shakespeare's  sonnets.  Not  a  bad 
life's  work  for  any  man  ! 


XII 

It  would  be  foolish  to  leave  this  fascinating  subject 
without  a  word  as  to  Butler's  poems.  The  Psalm  of 
Montreal  is  by  far  the  most  famous,  on  account  of  the 
glorious,  breezy,  unconventional  finish  to  each  stanza 
which  everybody  knows :  "  O  God  !  O  Montreal !  " 

The  reason  for  this  outburst  is  not  so  well  known. 
The  first  stanza  will  explain  : 

Stowed  away  in  a  Montreal  lumber-room 
The  Discobolus  standeth  and  turneth  his  face  to  the  wall  ; 
Dusty,  cobweb-covered,  maimed  and  set  at  naught, 
Beauty  crieth  in  an  attic  and  no  man  regardeth  : 
O  God  !  O  Montreal ! 

"  Beauty  crieth  in  an  attic  and  no  man  regardeth." 
That  was  Butler's  complaint  against  humanity,  as  it 
has  been  the  poets'  despairing  cry  all  through  the  ages. 


218  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

In  his  next  poem,  To  Critics  and  Others,  he  imitates 
Walt  Whitman  with  conspicuous  success  : 

O  critics,  cultured  critics  ! 

Who  will  praise  me  after  I  am  dead, 

Who  will  see  in  me  both  more  and  less  than  I  intended, 

But  who  will  swear  that  whatever  it  was  it  was  all  perfectly 

right : 
You  will  think  you  are  better  than  the  people  who,  when  I 

was  alive,  swore  that  whatever  I  did  was  wrong 
And  damned  ray  books  for  me  as  fast  as  I  could  write  them ; 
But  you  will  not  be  better,  you  will  be  just  the  same,  neither 

better  nor  worse, 
And  you  will  go  for  some  future  Butler  as  your  fathers  have 

gone  for  me. 
Oh  !  How  I  should  have  hated  you  ! 

I  should  very  much  like  to  quote  more  of  this  refresh- 
ing poem ;  it  is  so  exceedingly  good  for  us  to  be  ridi- 
culed in  advance  like  this.  Even  after  his  death  he 
manages  to  sting,  and  he  warns  us  not  to  thrust  him 
down  the  throats  of  the  public  of  our  or  any  other  age. 
"  You,  Nice  People  !  who  will  be  sick  of  me  because  the 
critics  thrust  me  down  your  throats,  but  who  would 
take  me  willingly  enough  if  you  were  not  bored  about 
me  .  .  .  neglect  me,  burlesque  me,  boil  me  down  [that's 
what  I've  done,  being  no  critic],  do  whatever  you  like 
with  me,  but  do  not  think  that,  if  I  were  living,  I  should 
not  aid  and  abet  you.  There  is  nothing  that  even 
Shakespeare  would  enjoy  more  than  a  good  burlesque 
of  Hamlet." 

It  would  require  an  exceedingly  able  man  to  "  rag," 
parody  or  burlesque  Butler,  and  he  most  certainly 
knew  it ;  but  he  failed  if  he  thought  that  by  writing 
this  poem  he  would  stop  critics  from  writing  about  him. 

It  has  been  his  good  or  ill  fortune  to  have  been  the 
subject  of  innumerable  lectures  and  articles  and  even 


SAMUEL  BUTLER  219 

books  in  recent  years,  and  by  a  quaint  irony  he  seems 
to  have  had  fewer  bad  ones  than  most  men.  Gilbert 
Cannan  and  John  Harris  have  each  of  them  been 
thoroughly  imbued  with  the  spirit  of  Butler,  and  have 
certainly  made  the  way  easier  for  those  who  have  failed 
to  find  him  hitherto.  Anything  which  drives  people  to 
read  the  man  for  themselves  is  so  much  to  the  good,  for 
the  education  of  a  well-read  man  may  very  well  be  quite 
incomplete  if  he  has  missed  the  works  of  the  author  of 
Erewhon.    But  Butler  is  nothing  if  not  unexpected. 

Immediately  following  upon  this  nasty  brick  thrown 
into  the  camp  of  the  critics  we  find  a  translation  into 
Greek  verse  of  Mrs  Gamp's  best  remark  about  Mrs 
Harris,  which  would  delight  the  hearts  of  any  but  the 
most  conservative  members  of  a  Common  Room. 

To  those  who  believe  that  Shakespeare's  sonnets 
were  merely  artificial  I  would  recommend  Butler's 
tremendous  counterblast,  purposely,  with  almost 
hideous  malignity,  called  An  Academic  Exercise : 


We  were  two  lovers  standing  sadly  by 

While  our  two  loves  lay  dead  upon  the  ground : 

Each  love  had  striven  not  to  be  the  first  to  die, 

But  each  was  gashed  with  many  a  cruel  wound. 

Said  I :  "  Your  love  was  false  while  mine  was  true." 

Aflood  with  tears  he  cried  :  "  It  was  not  so, 

'Twas  your  false  love  my  true  love  falsely  slew — 

For  'twas  your  love  that  was  the  first  to  go." 

Thus  did  we  stand  and  said  no  more  for  shame 

Till  I,  seeing  his  cheek  so  wan  and  wet, 

Sobbed  thus  :    "  So  be  it :  my  love  shall  bear  the  blame 

Let  us  inter  them  honourably."     And  yet 

I  swear  by  all  truth  human  and  divine 

'Twas  his  that  in  its  death  throes  murdered  mine. 


It  would  be  hard  to  deny  sincerity  and  passion  to 
this  ;  it  would  not  disgrace  the  pages  of  any  anthology 


220  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

of  English  poetry  that  I  know,  and  yet,  so  far  as  I  can 
recollect,  it  is  included  in  none. 

It  is  certainty  very  far  removed  from  mere  versifying 
if  it  cannot  be  claimed  as  great  poetry. 

Once  again  we  are  reminded  of  Rupert  Brooke's 
poetry  in  the  concluding  couplet  of  the  sonnet  entitled 
A  Prayer,  in  which  he  asks  that  his  open  sins  should  be 
forgiven  and  cleansed  first,  "  they  being  so  gross,"  and 
let  the  others  wait  : 

And  cleanse  not  all  even  then,  leave  me  a  few, 
I  would  not  be — not  quite — so  pure  as  you. 

I  know  of  no  one  except  some  of  the  very  youngest 
poets  of  our  time  who  have  this  power  of  leading  up  to 
a  daring  climax  and  then  turning  the  tables  suddenly, 
and  so  leave  you  with  a  point  of  view  at  once  unexpected, 
startling,  brilliant  and  yet  true. 

I  have  never  heard  it  suggested  that  Brooke  owed 
anything  to  Butler,  nor  can  I  find  any  definite  proof  of 
it,  but  in  the  light  of  the  concluding  lines  of  the  above 
and  the  next  two  sonnets  I  for  one  refuse  to  believe 
that  Brooke  did  not  know  his  Butler. 

In  Life  After  Death  the  last  couplet  runs  : 

Yet  meet  we  shall,  and  part,  and  meet  again, 
Where  dead  men  meet,  on  lips  of  living  men ; 

and  last  of  all  in  Handel,  "  best  lov'd  of  all  the  dead 
whom  I  love  best,:'  he  finishes  on  a  note  of  panegyric 
that  is  rare  indeed  : 

Methinks  the  very  worms  will  find  some  strain 
Of  yours  still  lingering  in  my  wasted  brain. 

We  are  now  at  the  end  of  our  journey  and  I  have 
obeyed  Butler's  own  advice  in  boiling  him  down  rather 
than  criticising  him,  for  the  sole  purpose  of  driving 


SAMUEL  BUTLER  221 

those  to  whom  he  is  still  but  a  name  to  cull  from  the 
vineyard  whence  I  have  just  gathered  a  sample  cluster 
of  grapes. 

His  great  value  to  us  of  to-day  is  his  exhilarating 
irreverence,  his  amazing  candour  and  entire  absence  of 
self- consciousness.  He  washes  us  clear  from  all  taint  of 
the  dishonesty  that  clings  round  our  stereotyped  views 
on  Christianity,  money  and  sex.  He  stands  alone 
among  the  masters  of  irony,  Swift,  Newman  and 
Meredith,  the  torch-bearer  of  that  unique  gift  to  a 
generation  not  at  all  at  home  in  its  clear,  rarefied 
atmosjohere.  His  sense  of  detachment  enables  him  to 
become  our  greatest  commentator  on  life,  by  one  who 
looks  on.  As  Mr  Harris  says :  "  In  a  sense  he  stands  for 
civilisation  looking  at  itself  and  laughing  in  the  realisa- 
tion of  how  funny  it  all  is."  This  capacity  for  laughter 
on  all  occasions  is  one  of  his  most  lovable  traits,  for 
whatever  else  he  was  Samuel  Butler  was  at  all  times 
lovable,  owing  to  his  large-hearted  humanity,  his 
never-failing  kindness  and  undeviating  sincerity.  He 
preached  in  what  is  the  only  possible  palatable  way 
nowadays,  a  light-hearted,  humorous  vein.  Everything 
made  him  "chuckle"  ;  every  twist  and  turn  in  the  world 
about  him  left  him  immensely  astonished  and  intensely 
amused.  He  had,  as  Shakespeare  had,  the  experiencing 
mind  ;  everything  was  grist  to  his  mill ;  he  forgot 
nothing,  because  he  had  the  good  sense  to  take  notes 
whenever  and  wherever  a  thought  or  scene  struck  him 
as  worth  committing  to  paper. 

This  is  an  age  of  much  writing  and  omnivorous  read- 
ing, but  as  in  art  the  process  of  selection  is  one  of  the 
hardest  to  attain,  so  in  reading  ;  if  we  choose  this  we 
must  miss  that.  Woe  to  that  man  who  wantonly  and 
wilfully  omits  to  make  the  acquaintance  of  Samuel 
Butler,  for  he  will  have  lost  a  chance  of  making  a  life- 


222  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

long  friend  of  one  of  the  most  penetrating,  courageous 
and  original  men  of  letters  which  England  has  ever  had 
the  good  fortune  to  produce. 

We  owe  Bernard  Shaw  to  him ;  our  feeling  on  re- 
reading his  works  for  the  twelfth  time  is  one  of 
wonder  that  he  has  not  left,  not  one  foster-son  only, 
but  a  score  or  more,  each  of  them  as  much  superior 
to  Shaw  as  Butler  was  to  him. 

For  all  who  wish  to  leave  behind  them  some  work 
which  shall  outlive  their  own  lifetime,  a  careful  study 
of  Butler's  works  is  not  only  a  pleasure  but  a  prime 
necessity.  He  will  give  them  fresh  ideas  and  renew 
their  courage  and  shower  on  them  hints  about  life  and 
its  meaning  and  how  to  transcribe  its  effect  on  them 
more  abundantly  than  any  other  writer  of  whatever  age. 


VIII 
RICHARD   MIDDLETON 

NOW  that  six  years  have  elapsed  since  the  un- 
timely death  of  one  of  the  most  promising  of 
the  young  geniuses  of  the  century  there  seems 
some  danger  lest,  in  the  storm  and  stress  of  the  age  in 
which  we  live,  Richard  Middleton  should  be  neglected 
and  forgotten  by  all  save  his  few  disciples  and  enthusi- 
astic foster-children,  which  would  be  an  incalculable 
loss  to  English  letters,  for  there  are  few  enough  in  these 
days  who  will  dare  to  stand  up  and  preach  the  gospel 
of  the  worship  of  the  beautiful,  and  fewer  still  who  are 
able  to  transport  us,  as  Kenneth  Grahame  does,  to  the 
days  when  every  tree  was  green,  to  our  own  golden 
age  of  infancy,  to  those  dream-days  of  halcyon  contents 
and  immeasurably  happy  moments  of  early  childhood. 
Never  has  there  been  a  time  when  we  so  acutely 
realised  the  worth  of  the  priceless  heritage  which  we 
have  lost  by  growing  up  as  now  ;  and  anyone  who  will 
sing  to  us  one  of  the  songs  of  our  own  innocence,  who 
will  remind  us  of  our  own  childish  Arcadia,  has  a  value 
far  above  rubies  in  a  time  of  war. 

Richard  Middleton  was  that  evanescent,  shapeless 
thing,  a  meteor  ...  he  founded  no  school,  he  imitated 
no  man,  he  carried  on  no  tradition.  I  can  recollect  no 
one  in  the  least  like  him ;  he  flashed  into  our  ken 
suddenly,  without  warning,  in  1910.  In  1911,  failing 
to  make  the  world  perceive  that  beauty  and  poetry 
were  essential  to  man's  welfare  and  recognising  that  he 
himself  had  failed  by  too  much  dreaming  and  too  little 
action,  he  determined  to  seek  adventure  in  the  unknown 
223 


224  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

and  committed  suicide  in  Brussels  at  the  age  of  twenty- 
nine. 

He  was  educated  at  St  Paul's  School,  and  then  went 
into  an  insurance  office  in  the  City,  afterwards  giving 
up  "  a  large  salary,"  to  quote  his  own  words,  "  in  order 
to  write  poetry."  He  became  a  sub- editor  under  Mr 
Frank  Harris,  but  his  casual,  cheerfully  unpunctual 
nature  hardly  suited  the  profession  he  had  now  entered, 
so  he  threw  it  up  in  order  to  confine  his  attention  wholly 
to  poetry,  all  of  which  so  pleased  Mr  Harris  that  he  had 
no  difficulty  in  getting  it  printed  in  the  j3apers  over 
which  from  time  to  time  his  editor  had  control.  In 
Contemporary  Portraits  Mr  Frank  Harris  gives  us 
valuable  first-hand  impressions  of  a  man  who  seems 
to  have  been  known  only  to  the  few. 

He  had  thick  black  hair,  a  furrowed  forehead,  shrewd, 
wistful,  penetrating  eyes  (like  Conrad),  had  never  shaved 
in  his  life,  and  was  devoted  to,  and  beloved  of,  all 
children.  He  was  deeply  read  in  English,  and  possessed 
an  astonishingly  sure  judgment  of  other  men's  work  : 
of  his  own  he  had  the  self-criticism  of  the  masters. 
His  prose  was  always  the  prose  of  the  singer — limpid, 
musical,  rhythmic,  almost  too  perfectly  rounded.  And 
yet  in  it  there  is  the  magic  that  makes  words  live  ;  all 
his  thoughts  pass  through  the  testing  crucible  of  artistic 
perception  and  come  out  changed,  winged,  eternal. 

Whether  it  be  that  famous  story  of  The  Ghost  Ship, 
where  we  seem  really  to  see  the  fairy  barque  sailing  away 
over  the  turnip  field,  through  the  windy  stars,  its  port- 
holes and  bay-windows  blazing  with  lights  to  the  accom- 
paniment of  singing  and  fiddling  on  deck  on  the  part 
of  all  the  village  ghosts  who  have  been  inveigled  away 
on  it,  or  that  incident  in  The  Brighton  Road,  where  the 
dead  boy  is  eternally  condemned  to  go  on  tramping — 
tramping  ...  in  all  his  stories  there  is  an  uncanny 


RICHARD  MIDDLETON  225 

something  which  makes  them  take  wing  beyond  the 
author's  conception,  that  elusive  quality  which,  for 
want  of  a  better  word,  we  call  genius. 

His  stories  are  woven  like  delicate  spiders'-webs,  be- 
sprinkled with  dew  ;  they  are  pure  gossamer,  unbeliev- 
ably beautiful ;  but  touch  them  and  they  fall  to  pieces 
in  your  hand.  They  must  be  read  in  their  entirety  to 
be  appreciated  :  quotation  in  this  case  is  like  Dr 
Johnson's  brick,  no  criterion  whatever  of  the  excellence 
of  the  building. 

The  effect  is  always  heightened  by  a  sure  sense  of 
humour  which  crops  up  in  all  sorts  of  unexpected  places 
throughout  his  work. 

What  a  quantity  of  wisdom  is  hidden  in  this  para- 
graph on  his  own  schooldays.  ;<  You're  only  here  for 
a  little  spell,"  he  said  ;  "  you'll  be  surprised  how  short 
it  is.  And  don't  be  miserable  just  because  you're 
different.  I'm  different ;  it's  a  jolly  good  thing  to 
be  different" — and  then,  after  a  pause — "All  the 
same,  I  don't  see  why  you  should  always  have  dirty 
nails.  ..."  Or,  again,  in  this  story  of  the  author,  who, 
having  finished  his  great  book,  "  read  it  to  his  friends, 
who  made  suggestions  that  would  have  involved  its 
re-writing  from  one  end  to  the  other  ;  he  read  it  to  his 
enemies,  who  told  him  that  it  Avas  nearly  good  enough 
to  publish  ;  he  read  it  to  his  wife,  who  said  that  it  was 
very  nice,  and  that  it  was  time  to  dress  for  dinner." 

It  is  this  faculty  which  must  have  so  endeared  him  to 
children.  Certainly  no  other  man,  Kenneth  Grahame 
and  Sir  James  Barrie  alone  excepted,  ever  entered  so 
completely  into  the  thoughts  and  ways  of  childhood. 

No  man  has  so  faithfully  transcribed  the  best  moments 
and  those  hidden  thoughts  of  our  early  days  which  we 
imagined  were  forgotten  or  a  part  of  ourselves  that  was 
dead  before  we  came  across  this  book.     How  perfect 


226  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

and  yet  how  characteristic  is  the  sentence  uttered 
almost  unconsciously  by  the  small  boy  in  the  wood. 
"  All  the  wasted  moonlight,"  he  cried  ;  "  the  grass  is 
quite  wet  with  it," 

He  brings  back  all  the  secret  longings  and  untellable 
ecstasies  of  our  early  youth  which  we  never  breathed  to 
the  Olympians  for  fear  of  ridicule.  Childhood's  loves 
are  strange  loves  but  they  are  very  real ;  uncanny  to 
the  adult  mind,  but  so  natural  to  the  infant  intelligence 
as  scarcely  to  need  comment.  The  majority  of  us  are 
nowadays  scarcely  enamoured  of  the  lawn-mower,  but 
have  we  forgotten  the  day  when  "  the  very  appearance 
of  the  thing  was  cheery  and  companionable,  with  its 
hands  outstretched  to  welcome  mine  and  its  coat  of 
green  more  vivid  than  any  lawn.  To  seize  hold  of  its 
smooth  handles  was  like  shaking  hands  with  an  old 
friend,  and  as  it  rattled  over  the  gravel  path  it  chattered 
to  me  in  the  gruff  tones  of  a  jovial  uncle.  Once  on  the 
smooth  lawn  its  voice  thrilled  to  song  tremulous  and 
appealing  and  filled  with  the  throbbings  of  great  wings. 
And  cheered  by  that  song  I  might  drive  my  chariot 
where  I  would.  Not  for  me  the  stiff,  brocaded  pattern 
beloved  of  our  gardener  :  I  made  curves,  skirting  the 
shadows  of  the  tall  poplars  or  cutting  the  lawn  into 
islands  and  lagoons  :  with  the  cold  inhumanity  of  youth 
I  would  marvel  at  the  injudicious  earthworms  that 
tried  to  stay  my  progress  and  perished  for  their  pains." 

Surely  that  wakes  a  responsive  chord  in  our  minds  of 
days  when  we  burnt  witches  on  the  rubbish  heap,  when 
we  coiled  the  garden  hose  round  our  legs,  Laocoon- 
like,  when  we,  too,  launched  our  Argonauts,  braving 
Farmer  Bates'  terrible  wrath,  by  sailing  past  his  for- 
bidden meadow,  when  we  too  tramped  through  the 
woods  in  search  of  the  magic  pool  by  night. 

There  are  only  too  few  books  that  are  able  to  transport 


RICHARD  MIDDLETON  227 

us  back  to  those  golden  hours  when  we  played  cricket 
(real  cricket,  when  you  were  out  if  you  hit  the  ball  into 
the  next  garden,  and  stopped  playing  if  you  broke  a 
window),  owned  pirate-ships  and  magic  carpets,  and 
founded  secret  societies  in  the  secrecy  of  the  lumber- 
room. 

Whenever  we  feel  that  nostalgia  of  childhood  which 
overtakes  each  of  us  so  often  amid  the  worries  and  cares 
of  life  to-day,  which  causes  us  to  batter  vainly  at  fast- 
locked  nursery  doors,  or  to  look  sadly  at  the  gaudy 
toy- shops,  robbed  by  the  cynical  years  of  their  fit  halo, 
at  such  a  time  if  we  can  find  no  children  to  play  with 
and  our  hearts  yearn  for  the  fairy  laughter  of  playing 
infants,  to  take  down  a  volume  of  Richard  Middleton's 
child  fancies  will  do  much  to  appease  our  longing  and 
cause  us  to  live  over  again  those  magic  hours  which  we 
have  now  for  ever  lost.  Everyone  knows  that  the  finest 
joys  he  experiences  are  just  the  most  incommunicable  : 
who  can  harness  Pegasus  to  describe  the  sensation 
of  a  man  who  has  just  made  a  mighty,  almost  im- 
possible tackle  at  "  Rugger,"  brought  off  a  long- 
practised  shot  of  great  difficulty  at  billiards,  sung  a 
song  in  such  a  way  as  to  thrill  his  audience  with  a 
magnetism  so  great  that  they  forget  to  applaud,  climbed 
a  hitherto  inaccessible  peak,  written  the  last  word  of  a 
play,  novel  or  poem  which  he  knows  to  be  a  living  force, 
eternal,  incorruptible:  who,  I  repeat,  can  hope  to 
express  life's  great  moments  even  when  we  have  reached 
years  that  perhaps  have  brought  the  power  of  self- 
expression  ? 

How  much  less  can  we  hope  to  regain  exactly  or  ever 
to  reproduce  in  the  minds  of  other  people  the  days  of 
our  Golden  Age  :  at  the  most  absurd  moments,  while 
hurrying  into  school  at  the  last  moment,  while  catching 
a  train,  on  a  route  march,  in  the  middle  of  worrying  out 


228  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

a  mathematical  problem,  some  insidious  sound,  a  cock 
crowing,  the  scrunch  of  a  wheelbarrow,  the  haycutter 
in  the  fields,  the  pack  of  hounds  giving  tongue,  some 
wave  of  recollection  sweeps  over  us  and  on  the  instant 
we  are  back  in  that  old  garden,  chasing  the  guinea-fowl, 
penetrating  the  meadow  brook  to  the  forbidden  haunts 
of  the  pixy-ridden  mill  and  the  deep  trout  pool,  seated 
in  the  cleft  of  the  blasted  oak  looking  out  over 
Westward  Ho  !  and  Lundy  for  a  sight  of  Amyas  Leigh 
and  Salvation  Yeo,  for  John  Silver  and  Captain 
Bartholomew  Roberts ;  some  friends  show  us  over 
their  house,  and  having  penetrated  every  recess,  we  say, 
to  their  complete  mystification  :  "  May  I  see  the  attic 
now,  please  ?  "  and  coldly  wondering  at  the  lunatic 
they  harbour  as  their  guest  they  push  us  into  the  raftered 
room  full  of  apples.  In  a  moment  we  are  thousands  of 
miles  away  on  a  lonely  sea,  plying  our  raft,  with  rations 
given  out  and  hope  lost  .  .  .  when  suddenly  the  cry 
goes  up  :  "  A  sail !  a  sail !  "  and  we  are  taken  on  board 
the  friendly  sloop  and  swear  eternal  vows  of  comrade- 
ship with  the  pirate  chief,  whose  incarnadined  face, 
bandage-hidden,  haunts  our  dreams  a  thousand  nights. 
Such  tricks  do  our  senses  play  us,  and  how  pitiable  are 
those  (if  there  exist  any  such,  which  I  much  doubt)  who 
are  never  betrayed  by  the  smell  of  leaves  on  a  November 
night,  by  the  sight  of  a  Guy  Fawkes  bonfire,  by  the 
chestnut  roasting  on  All-Hallows  E'en,  when  they 
gaze  into  the  fire  and  build  again  those  gorgeous  palaces 
which  were  once  so  real — so  real  .  .  .  but  I  am  lost 
myself.  You  see  the  effect  of  Middleton  :  he  drives 
you  back  willy-nilly,  and  life  becomes  for  a  few  precious 
moments  all  sunshine,  laughter  and  innocence,  and  war 
and  separation  are  no  more. 

But  there  is  another  side  to  Middleton  which  it  is 
necessary  to  understand  before  we  can  pretend  to  have 


RICHARD  MIDDLETON  229 

in  our  minds  a  picture  of  the  complete  man.  He 
recurs  to  it  again  and  again  both  in  his  prose  and  his 
poetry — and  in  its  essence  we  might  call  this  trait  the 
lament  of  the  writer,  the  tragedy  of  the  artist ;  an  over- 
powering sense  of  the  inadequacy  of  the  word-maker 
and  the  dreamer  in  comparison  with  the  man  of  action 
seems  an  ever-present  topic  in  the  mind  of  Middleton 
as  it  was  in  the  mind  of  Robert  Louis  Stevenson. 

While  ordinary  efficient  men  and  women  are  enjoying  the 
promise  of  the  morning,  the  fulfilment  of  the  afternoon,  the 
tranquillity  of  evening,  we  are  still  trying  to  discover  a  fitting 
epithet  for  the  dew  of  dawn.  For  us  Spring  paves  the  woods 
with  beautiful  words  rather  than  flowers,  and  when  we  look 
into  the  eyes  of  our  mistress  we  see  nothing  but  adjectives. 
Does  a  handful  of  love-songs  really  outweigh  the  smile  of 
a  pretty  girl,  or  a  hardly-written  romance  compensate  the 
author  for  months  of  lost  adventure  ?  We  have  only  one  life 
to  live,  and  we  spend  the  greater  part  of  it  writing  the 
history  of  dead  hours. 

Few  of  us  are  fortunate  enough  to  accomplish  anything 
that  was  in  the  least  worth  doing,  so  we  fall  back  on  the 
arid  philosophy  that  it  is  effort  alone  that  counts. 

And  then,  in  a  passage  pregnant  with  real  introspec- 
tion, he  gives  us  a  rare  insight  into  his  own  character. 
It  had  been  raining,  he  said,  one  morning,  and  while 
watching  from  his  window  he  suddenly  became  con- 
scious of  a  wet  morning  years  before  when  he  was  eight 
years  old,  a  real  wet,  grey  day,  when  he  heard  the  rain 
dripping  from  the  fir-trees  on  to  the  scullery  roof  and 
the  wind  every  now  and  then  drove  the  rain  down  on 
the  soaked  lawn  with  a  noise  like  breaking  surf;  he 
remembered  thinking  how  nice  it  would  be  if  it  rained 
really  hard  and  flooded  the  house  so  that  they  would 
all  have  to  starve  for  three  weeks,  and  then  be  rescued 
excitingly  in  boats  .  .  .  behind  him  in  the  room  his 
brothers  were  playing  chess  and  his  sister  was  patiently 


280  STUDIES  IN  LITEEATURE 

beating  a  doll  in  a  corner.  The  clock  on  the  mantel- 
piece ticked  very  slowly  and  he  realised  that  an  eternity 
of  those  long  seconds  separated  him  from  dinner-time. 

He  thought  he  would  like  to  go  out.  The  enterprise 
presented  certain  difficulties  and  dangers,  but  none  that 
were  insuperable.  He  would  have  to  steal  down  to  the 
hall  unobserved  :  he  would  have  to  open  the  front  door 
without  making  a  noise  and  he  would  have  to  run  down 
the  front  drive  under  the  eyes  of  many  windows.  Once 
beyond  the  gate,  however,  he  would  be  safe. 

In  the  wood  near  the  house  he  might  meet  the 
magician  for  whom  he  had  looked  so  often  in  vain  on 
sunny  days,  for  it  was  quite  likely  that  he  preferred 
walking  in  bad  weather  when  no  one  else  was  about. 
Then  he  thought  of  the  probable  punishments  that 
would  ensue,  but  they  did  not  trouble  him  much,  at 
any  rate  in  retrospect.  And  yet  he  did  not  go  out : 
he  stayed  dreaming  until  the  golden  moment  for  action 
had  passed  and  he  was  called  back  to  a  prosaic  world  by 
the  shrieks  of  the  chess-players,  who  were  suddenly 
locked  in  battle.  And  this  later  morning,  as  he  stood 
at  the  window  again  watching  the  rain,  Richard  Middle- 
ton  indulges  in  the  vain  wish  that  he  had  then  set  forth 
to  seek  adventure.  He  would  have  met  the  enchanter 
in  the  wood  and  he  would  have  taught  him  to  conquer 
worlds,  and  to  leave  the  easy  triumphs  of  dreams  to 
madmen,  philosophers  and  poets.  He  would  have 
made  him  a  man  of  action,  a  statesman,  a  soldier,  a 
founder  of  cities  or  a  digger  of  graves. 

And  then  comes  the  crucial  passage.  He  concludes 
the  essay  thus  : 

It  seems  to  me  likely  enough  that  that  moment  of  hesita- 
tion before  the  schoolroom  window  determined  a  habit  of 
mind  that  has  kept  me  dreaming  ever  since.  For  all  my  life 
I  have  preferred  thought  to  action  :  I  have  never  run  to  the 


RICHARD  MIDDLETON  231 

little  wood :  I  have  never  met  the  enchanter.  And  so  this 
morning,  when  Fate  played  me  this  trick  and  my  dream  was 
chilled  for  an  instant  by  the  icy  breath  of  the  past,  I  did  not 
rnsh  out  into  the  streets  of  life  and  lay  about  me  with  a 
flaming  sword.  No  :  I  picked  up  my  pen  and  wrote  some 
words  on  a  piece  of  paper,  and  lulled  my  shocked  senses  with 
the  tranquillity  of  the  idlest  dream  of  all. 

My  life,  my  beautiful  life  all  wasted  : 

The  gold  days,  the  blue  days  to  darkness  sunk. 

The  bread  was  here,  and  I  have  not  tasted  : 
The  wine  was  here,  and  I  have  not  drunk. 

I  feel  that  in  one  sense  this  is  the  most  tragically 
true,  the  most  artistically  great  of  all  Middleton's 
writing. 

It  is  absolutely  impossible  to  read  it  without  trans- 
ferring the  whole  idea  over  to  oneself.  It  is  oneself 
who  has  failed,  who  has  stood  at  the  window,  and 
through  inertia,  panic  or  for  whatever  cause,  has  let  the 
golden  moment  go  by,  and  instead  of  sallying  forth 
sword  in  hand  to  rid  the  world  of  some  abuse  we  have 
preferred  the  more  comfortable  fire  and  attempted  to 
delude  ourselves  with  the  obvious  lie  that  after  all, 
perhaps,  there  was  no  wizard  in  the  wood. 

Sanity,  we  have  been  told,  is  simply  a  capacity  for 
becoming  accustomed  to  the  monstrous ;  and  Middle- 
ton's  tragedy  lies  as  much  as  anything  in  the  fact  that 
though  he  refuses  to  call  ugliness  beautiful,  yet  he  is 
too  much  of  a  dreamer  to  sally  forth  sword  in  hand  as 
the  avenger  of  wrongs. 

Most  of  us  forget  our  early  frantic  anger  at  the  need- 
less horrors  that  abound  on  every  side ;  we  have  our 
fight  against  it  young,  are  thoroughly  well  cowed  and 
are  lucky  if  in  the  end  we  not  only  agree  with  and 
defend  the  existing  chaos  and  mistake  it  for  order,  light 
and  beauty,  but  quite  definitely  throw  our  whole  weight 


232  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

on  the  side  of  ugliness  and  make  a  religion  of  it.     Not 
so  Richard  Middleton  : 

When  a  young  man  first  awakens  to  a  sense  of  the  beauty 
and  value  of  life,  it  is  natural  that  he  should  be  overwhelmed 
by  the  ugliness  of  the  inheritance  that  his  ancestors  have 
forced  upon  him.  He  finds  in  the  civilisation  that  he  has 
had  no  place  in  devising  a  tyranny  against  which  it  appears 
almost  impossible  to  make  any  resistance,  a  dogma  which  he 
is  told  everyone  except  a  young  fool  must  accept  as  a  truth. 
.  .  .  He  may,  for  instance,  think  that  it  is  better  to  grow 
and  love  roses  in  a  cottage  garden  than  to  reign  in  an 
umbrella  factory ;  but  this  briefest  of  the  illusions  of  youth 
will  be  shattered  forthwith  by  what  appears  to  be  the  first 
law  of  civilised  life  :  that  a  man  can  only  earn  his  living  by 
the  manufacture  of  ugliness. 

He  then  shows  you  the  young  man  turning  for  com- 
fort to  latter-day  prophets  and  philosophers,  who  spend 
their  time,  he  finds  (in  Middleton' s  glorious  phrase)  in 
scheming  little  revolutions  on  a  sound  conservative  basis : 
only  in  the  poets  can  the  young  man  find  solace. 

It  is  unnecessary,  he  goes  on,  to  point  out  that  the 
dangerous  revolutionary  spirit  which  worships  lovely 
things  is  not  encouraged  in  our  national  schools. 

The  children  of  the  State  are  taught  to  cut  up  flowers 
and  to  call  the  fragments  by  cunning  names,  but  they 
are  not  invited  to  love  them  for  their  beauty. 

Their  lips  lisp  dates  and  the  dry  husks  of  history,  but 
they  have  no  knowledge  of  the  splendid  pageant  of 
bygone  kingdoms  and  dead  races. 

The  cheaper  newspapers,  which  alone  are  read  by  the 
people,  as  a  whole  seek  out  and  dilate  on  ugliness  with 
passionate  ingenuity  .  .  .  only  in  the  poets  ...  I 
repeat,  can  a  young  man  find  solace. 

And  would  you  know  how  to  be  a  poet  in  Middleton's 
words  ? 

"  Take  something — I  would  say  take  anything — and 


RICHARD  MIDDLETON  233 

love  it,  and  thereafter,  if  he  were  a  child  of  his  century, 
I  should  have  to  tell  him  of  love,  the  rude,  uncivilised 
force  that  has  inspired  all  the  deeds  worth  doing,  that 
has  made  all  the  things  worth  making.  I  should  tell 
him  that  it  was  nonsense  to  speak  of  anything  or  any- 
body being  worthy  of  his  love,  that  the  question  was 
whether  he  could  make  his  love  worthy  of  any  shadow 
of  an  idea  that  penetrates  his  education.  I  should  tell 
him — to  what  end  ?  That  he  might  see  life  as  he  would 
have  made  it,  and  weep  his  years  away  ;  that  he  might 
find  beauty  and  fail  to  win  it ;  that  he  might  cry  his 
scorn  of  ugliness  on  the  hills  and  have  never  a  hearer 
for  his  pains  ?  Pooh  !  It  were  kinder  to  let  him  snore 
with  the  others.  There  are  too  many  unhappy  people 
already." 

Yet  Middleton  himself,  with  his  eyes  open,  chose  the 
better  way  :  it  is  as  a  poet  that  he  lives  for  the  majority 
of  his  readers,  one  who  ever  strove  to  keep  the  sun  upon 
the  western  wall. 

Roses  and  lilies  blowing  fair, 
A  sunny  castle  in  old  Spain, 
A  lock  of  my  beloved's  hair, 
A  tale  that  shall  be  told  again, 
Joy  and  sorrow,  heaven  and  hell — 
These  are  all  the  wares  I  sell. 

As  one  of  his  critics  has  said,  the  visible  world  and  the 
passions  of  men  and  women  were  all  his  care. 

Mr  Frank  Harris  declares  that  The  Bathing  Boy  is 
finer  than  anything  in  Herrick. 

His  theory  of  poetry  is  to  be  found  definitely,  clearly 
and  finally  in  that  remarkable  passage  in  The  Poet's 
Allegory  : 

So  he  pulled  out  his  pipe  and  made  a  mournful  song  to 
himself  of  the  dancing  gnats  and  the  bitter  odour  of  the 
bonfires  in  the  townsfolks'  gardens.     And  the  children  drew 


234  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

near  to  hear  him  sing,  for  they  thought  his  song  was  pretty, 
until  their  fathers  drove  them  home,  saying :  "  That  stuff 
has  no  educational  value." 

u  Why  haven't  you  a  message  ?"   they  asked  the  boy. 

"  I  come  to  tell  you  that  the  grass  is  green  beneath  your 
feet  and  that  the  sky  is  blue  over  your  heads." 

"  Oh  !     But  we  know  all  that !  "  they  answered. 

"  Do  you  !  Do  you  !  "  screamed  the  boy.  "  Do  you  think 
you  could  stop  over  your  absurd  labours  if  you  knew  how  blue 
the  sky  is  ?     You  would  be  out  singing  on  the  hills  with  me." 

et  Then  who  would  do  our  work  ?  "   they  said,  mocking  him. 

"Then  who  would  want  it  done  ?  "  he  retorted. 

When  I  lived  I  sought  no  wings, 
Schemed  no  heaven,  planned  no  hell, 
But,  content  with  little  things, 
Made  an  earth,  and  it  was  well. 
Song  and  laughter,  food  and  wine, 
Roses,  roses  red  and  white, 
And  a  star  or  two  to  shine 
On  my  dewy  world  at  night. 
Lord,  what  more  could  I  desire? 
With  my  little  heart  of  clay 
I  have  lit  no  eternal  fire 
To  burn  my  dreams  on  Judgment  Day  ! 

But  we,  the  great  British  public,  had  no  use  for  song 
and  laughter,  the  sweet  beauty  of  roses  in  those  pre- 
war days  :  it  is  only  now  that  poets  can  sell  their  wares 
and  so  continue  to  exist. 

First  John  Davidson  and  then  Richard  Middleton — 
great  singers  both — had  to  leave  a  world  grown  old  and 
cold  and  weary  and  plunge  into  the  unknown,  and  in 
one  last  piteous  cry  Middleton  takes  his  farewell  of  us  : 

So  here's  an  end  ;  I  ask  forgetfulness 
Now  that  my  little  store  of  hours  is  spent, 
And  heart  to  laugh  upon  my  punishment. 
Dear  God,  what  means  a  poet  more  or  less  ? 


IX 

THE   GENIUS   OF   JOHN   MASEFIELD 

THOSE  of  us  who  were  at  Oxford  between  1905 
and  1909  have  good  cause  to  be  thankful  for 
many  things,  but  above  all,  for  the  fact  that 
we  were  then  waking  to  the  reality  that  we  really  were, 
without  hyperbole,  living  in  an  age  of  Renaissance. 
On  a  certain  gloomy  November  afternoon,  long  to  be 
remembered,  I  went  to  the  Corn  Exchange  to  witness 
the  production  of  some  plays  of  Celtic  origin,  by 
W.  B.  Yeats,  of  whom  we  knew  something,  and  of 
one,  John  Millington  Synge,  of  whom  we  and  the  world 
about  us  knew  practically  nothing. 

To  have  seen  The  Playboy  of  the  Western  World  acted, 
with  Miss  Maire  O'Neill  as  "  Pegeen  Mike,"  before  any- 
one on  this  side  of  the  Irish  Sea  knew  of  it,  ranks  us 
with  the  Elizabethan  theatre-goers  who  first  saw 
Hamlet,  knowing  not  whether  it  was  to  be  good  or  bad. 
Three  or  four  years  later  it  did  not  matter.  Every- 
one recognised  a  master  spirit  in  the  Irish  playwright, 
and  an  unfailing  topic  of  conversation  over  any  dinner- 
table  was  the  ability  of  the  Abbey  Theatre  Players  to 
show  us  what  acting  really  meant. 

What  mattered  was  that  we  were  among  the  pioneers. 
Now  we  smile  from  our  fastnesses  at  the  way  English 
critics  "lap"  up  Synge's  plays,  and  books  appear  at  every 
turn,  books  of  panegyric  that  by  their  indiscriminating 
eulogies  must  make  the  playwright  turn  in  his  grave. 

Much  in  the  same  way  nothing  can  deprive  us  of  the 
pride  of  having  been  one  of  the  first  to  read  and  love 
John  Masefield.     In  1905  his  name,  it  can  safely  be 

235 


236  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

said,  was  absolutely  unknown  to  the  great  majority  of 
thinking  men  and  women  in  this  country,  and  yet  there 
are  among  us  several  who  are  certain  that  he  has 
written  nothing  so  fine  or  lasting  (except  August,  1914, 
which  is  by  far  the  best  poem  yet  written  on  the  war) 
since  that  time,  and  those  who  assert  this  are  not  carp- 
ing critics.     But  I  wish  to  expand  that  statement  later. 

Those  of  us  who  were  lucky  enough  to  come  into  the 
circle  of  Masefield-lovers  while  that  circle  was  still  one 
of  small  compass  feel  a  thrill  of  joy  and  pleasure  to 
think  that  we  recognised  the  capabilities  of  the  poet 
and  came  under  his  spell  before  the  mass  of  readers  had 
even  heard  his  name. 

The  diversity  of  the  man  now  is  bewildering.  First 
we  knew  him  as  a  writer  of  lyrics  and  ballads,  one  or 
two  of  which  are  unlike  anything  else  in  the  English 
language.  Shortly  after  this  we  found  him  blossoming 
out  into  a  novelist;  Captain  Margaret,  Multitude  and 
Solitude  and  The  Street  of  To-Day  are  the  novels  of  a 
poet,  it  is  true,  but  they  are  still  able  to  hold  their  own 
in  that  particular  niche,  a  small  one,  which  contains  the 
novels  we  keep  to  read  again.  And  A  Tarpaulin  Muster 
— a  book  of  short  stories — must  not  be  forgotten. 

No  sooner  had  we  recovered  from  the  astonishment 
of  this  than  we  found  him  proffering  us  a  second 
Treasure  Island,  beating  Stevenson  on  his  own  ground. 
I  know  of  many  boys  who  prefer  Jim  Davis  and 
Lost  Endeavour  to  any  other  stories  of  buccaneers, 
pirates  and  adventure  yet  written. 

Then  those  who  have  seen  Pompey  the  Great,  Nan  and 
Philip  the  King  acted  declare  that  all  other  contem- 
porary drama  is  insipid  in  comparison.  He  has  the 
dramatist's  true  touch  and  absolute  realisation  of  the 
exigencies  of  the  stage.  Nan  without  doubt  is  a  play 
that  will  outlive  all  the  other  dramas  of  its  age. 


JOHN  MASEFIELD  237 

But  it  is  not  to  my  purpose  here  to  discuss  Mr 
Masefield  as  a  dramatist,  as  a  novelist,  or  as  a  writer 
of  boys'  adventure  stories. 

It  is  his  fate  to  have  become  the  most  popular  poet 
of  the  age  at  a  bound,  and  it  is  possible  now,  with  the 
mass  of  material  he  has  produced,  to  find  reasons  for 
this,  and  to  come  to  some  sort  of  conclusion  as  to 
whether  it  has  benefited  his  art  so  to  have  been  taken 
up  as  a  craze. 

In  nearly  every  case  it  has  been  truly  said  of  poets 
that  their  genuine  success  always  varies  inversely  with 
their  contemporary  success.  Martin  Tupper,  Byron 
and  Longfellow  are  outstanding  instances  of  versifiers 
who  drew  crowds  to  pay  homage  while  they  were  alive, 
whereas  Milton,  Keats  and  Shelley — to  select  a  few 
great  names  at  random — were  absolutely  unrecognised 
by  the  great  mass  of  readers  of  their  age,  and  made  no 
sort  of  impression  on  their  contemporaries. 

As  I  have  a  sort  of  thesis  to  propound,  it  will  be  better 
for  my  scheme  not  to  take  all  the  poems  in  chronological 
order,  but  to  arrange  them  in  the  best  possible  way  for 
my  argument. 

In  one  of  the  lesser  known,  but  most  valuable,  of 
Mr  Masefield' s  works,  A  Mainsail  Haul,  published  on 
the  1st  June  1905,  occur  these  verses  : 

I  yarned  with  ancient  shipmen  beside  the  galley  range, 
And   some    were   fond    of    women,    but   all    were    fond    of 

change ; 
They  sang  their  quivering  chanties,  all  in  a  fo'c's'le  drone, 
And  1  was  finely  suited,  if  I  had  only  known. 

I  rested  in  an  ale-house  that  had  a  sanded  floor, 

Where  seamen  sat  a-drinking  and  chalking  up  the  score ; 

They  yarned  of  ships  and  mermaids,  of  topsail  sheets  and 

slings, 
But  I  was  discontented ;  I  looked  for  better  things. 


238  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

I  heard  a  drunken  fiddler,  in  Billy  Lee's  Saloon, 
I  brooked  an  empty  belly  with  thinking  of  the  tune  ; 
I  swung  the  doors  disgusted  as  drunkards  rose  to  dance, 
And  now  I  know  the  music  was  life  and  life's  romance. 

The  poem  gives  a  wondrous  sight  into  the  mind  of 
the  author  ;  in  all  of  his  poems  there  is  that  insatiable 
hankering  after  the  sea  ;  it  is  dragged  in  even  at  the 
end  of  Daffodil  Fields,  of  all  unlikely  places. 

The  poem  has  practically  nothing  to  do  with  the  sea, 
but  the  author  cannot  resist  the  temptation  to  make 
the  story  a  legend  common  among  sailors  ;  hence  this 
last  stanza  that  you  may  rise  from  reading,  as  from  all 
his  other  poems,  with  a  strong  taste  of  salt  in  the 
mouth. 

But  these  introductory  verses  to  A  Mainsail  Haul 
show  us  something  more.  They  explain  his  right  to  be 
considered  The  Genius  of  the  Ale-house.  He  must  for 
ever  confine  his  genius  to  that  section  of  society  whose 
vocabulary  is  nearly  limited  to  "  Hell,"  "  By  Crimes," 
"  Bloody  "  and  other  even  less  savoury  expletives.1 

Imitators  of  Mr  Masefield,  and  these  have  already 
been  many,  have  based  their  forms  of  flattery  nearly 
entirely  upon  this  phase,  forgetful  of  the  fact  that  it  is 
the  lyrical  beauty  in  the  background  of  the  poems  that 
makes  the  poet  what  he  is,  and  not  the  daring  (it  will 
soon  cease  to  be  that)  innovation  of  employing  bargee 
and  bricklayer  terms  to  heighten  the  sense  of  reality. 

The  language,  customs,  manners  and  traits  of  the 
drunkard  and  sottish  are  to  him  "  life  and  life's 
romance."  He  is  "  finely  suited  "  in  describing  the 
ways  of  the  doxy  and  the  labourer's  mistress. 

1  It  is  not  because  he  likes  it  that  he  does  this,  but  because  his 
hypersensitive  nature  so  abhors  oaths  that  he  is  fascinated  against 
his  will,  much  in  the  same  way  as  Anglo-Indian  children  are 
fascinated  by  the  venomous  beauty  of  snakes.- 


JOHN  MASEFIELD  239 

In  a  book  published  even  earlier,  Salt-Water  Ballads 
(1902),  we  find  this  hymn  of  Consecration  : 

Others  may  sing  of  the  wine  and  the  wealth  and  the  mirth, 
The  portly  presence  of  potentates  goodly  in  girth  : 
Mine  be  the  dirt  and  the  dross,  the  dust  and  scum  of  the 
earth ! 

Theirs  be  the  music,  the  colour,  the  glory,  the  gold ; 
Mine  be  a  handful  of  ashes,  a  mouthful  of  mould. 

Of  the  maimed,  of  the  halt  and  the  blind  in  the  rain  and 
the  cold — 
Of  these  shall  my  songs  be  fashioned,  my  tales  be  told. 

What  plainer  statement  of  intention  can  man  wish 
than  that  ?  For  eleven  years  did  Mr  Masefield  cling 
to  his  ideal. 

Bearing  this  in  mind,  I  propose  now  to  take  in  turn 
the  larger  portion  of  his  recent  output,  most  of  which 
has  appeared  from  time  to  time  in  The  English  Review. 

The  Everlasting  Mercy  came  out  in  October,  1911. 
It  tells  the  story  of  a  young  rip,  Saul  Kane,  and  starts 
in  this  promising  fashion  : 

From  '41  to  '51 

I  was  my  folk's  contrary  son  ; 

I  bit  my  father's  hand  right  through 

And  broke  my  mother's  heart  in  two. 

I  sometimes  go  without  my  dinner 

Now  that  I  know  the  times  I've  gi'n  her. 

It  continues  in  the  same  easy  strain  to  explain  how  he 
fought  with  a  fellow-poacher,  Billy  Myers,  on  whose 
preserves  he  had  been  working. 

.   .  .  we  whom  Jesus  died  to  teach 

Fought  round  on  round,  three  minutes  each, 

By  the  fluke  of  his  enemy  spraining  his  thumb, 
Saul  gained  a  totally  unmerited  victory. 


240  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

All  the  company  of  spectators  and  victor  then 
proceed  to  "  The  Lion  "  to  celebrate  the  event.  On 
the  way  up  the  dark  stairs  he  accosts  the  barmaid,  a 
mistress  of  his,  and  arranges  an  assignation. 

A  riotous  scene  ensued  : 

Jack  chucked  her  chin,  and  Jim  accost  her 
With  bits  out  of  the  "  Maid  of  Gloster." 
And  fifteen  arms  went  round  her  waist. 
(And  then  men  ask.  Are  Barmaids  chaste  ?) 

This  last  line  reads  more  like  the  heading  of  a  letter 
to  a  daily  newspaper  than  a  serious  contribution  to 
contemporary  poetry. 

After  the  company  had  drunk  themselves  silly,  Saul 
drunkenly  meditates  on  life.     At  last 

A  madness  took  me  then.     I  felt 
I'd  like  to  hit  the  world  a  belt. 
I  felt  that  I  could  fly  through  air, 
A  screaming  star  with  blazing  hair — 

Instead  of  that  he  t;  tore  his  clothes  in  shreds,"  flung 
his  boots  through  the  windows  and  dashed  downstairs, 
smashing  lamps  on  the  way.  Then  he  rang  the  fire- 
bell. 

This  having  roused  the  populace,  he  proceeded  to 
harangue  them,  urging  them  to  chase  him,  which  they 
do.  Owing  to  his  fleetness  of  foot  he  easily  escapes  and 
manages  to  sleep  till  half-past  two  in  the  following 
afternoon. 

Then  a  second  frenzy  takes  him  and  he  goes  once 
more  into  the  street.  By  luck  he  meets  the  parson,  and 
in  a  long  socialistic  speech  denounces  the  universe. 

The  parson,  one  in  a  thousand,  quietly  argues  for  the 
present  state  : 

You  think  the  Church  an  outworn  fetter ; 
Kane,  keep  it,  till  you've  built  a  better.  .  .   . 


JOHN  MASEFIELD  241 

To  get  the  whole  world  out  of  bed 

And  washed,  and  dressed,  and  warmed,  and  fed, 

To  work,  and  back  to  bed  again, 

Believe  me,  Saul,  costs  worlds  of  pain. 

These  last  four  lines  are  worth  all  the  rest  of  the  poem 
put  together.  It  is  the  first  time  that  that  universal 
truth  has  been  stated  quite  so  boldly  and  yet  with  such 
unerring  accuracy.1 

Meanwhile  (the  parson  continues), 

my  friend,  'twould  be  no  sin 
To  mix  more  water  with  your  gin. 
We're  neither  saints  nor  Philip  Sidneys, 
But  mortal  men  with  mortal  kidneys. 

It  is  a  joy  for  once,  by  the  way,  to  find  a  parson  winning 
all  along  the  line. 

He  finds  himself  a  little  later  in  the  market-place, 
talking  to  a  small  boy  who  had  lost  his  mother.  Then 
follows  a  scene  of  real  poetry  and  pure  delight,  gossamer- 
like in  its  flimsy  flights,  but  having  the  true  ring  about 
it. 

I  told  a  tale,  to  Jim's  delight, 

Of  where  the  tom-cats  go  by  night. 

But  it  is  all  too  short  and  Mrs  Jaggard  comes  hastily  on 
to  the  scene,  and  reviews  Saul's  and  her  own  past  life 
in  a  whirl  of  words  truly  woeful. 

.  .  .  this  old  mother  made  me  see 
The  harm  I  done  by  being  me.  .   .   . 
So  back  to  bar  to  get  more  drink  .   .   . 

This  time  Miss  Bourne,  the  friend,  upbraids  him  :  the 
whole  poem  is  a  succession  of  sermons.     But  for  the 

1  It  is  really  extraordinary  how  often  Masefield  reminds  us  of 
Pope.  I  have  not  space  to  expand  this,  but  cp.  Biography  with 
Pope's  best  couplets  ;  it  will  bear  the  test. 

Q 


242  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

first  time  we  hit  upon  a  mysticism  that  reminds  us  of 
The  Ancient  Mariner  : — 

I  got  a  glimpse  of  what  it  meant, 
How  she  and  I  had  stood  before 
In  some  old  town  by  some  old  door 
Waiting  intent  while  someone  knocked 
Before  the  door  for  ever  locked  .  .  . 

Out  into  the  darkness  he  sped  like  Christy  Mahon  to 
discover  his  own  soul.  In  Nature's  own  wondrous 
beauty  he  discovers  peace  :  old  Callow,  the  ploughman, 
gives  him  the  clue  to  salvation.  So  ends  the  poem  that 
made  Mr  Masefield  famous  as  a  poet. 

Sufficient  time  has  now  passed  for  our  judgments  to 
be  cooled  ;  wherein  lies  the  appeal  of  this  strange  novel 
in  verse  ?  It  reads  at  times  like  a  Salvation  Army 
tract,  a  Revivalist  conversion  hymn.  The  story  is 
graphic  and  real  enough.  Such  things  have  happened, 
do  happen  daily  and  are  to  be  read  in  The  Christian 
World  and  The  Family  Herald. 

There  are  traces  of  the  passionate  lyricism  that 
marked  the  young  John  Masefield,  but  we  tremble  for 
what  he  is  going  to  make  of  himself. 

His  carelessness  in  metre  and  rhyme  is  appalling.  I 
have  already  given  several  instances.  Here  are  some 
more  : — 

"clock  for  you  "  is  succeeded  by  "crock  for  you," 
"fly  'un"  by  "Lion,"  "sons"  by  "once," 
"merry  all"  by  "burial,"  "black"  by  "back," 
"floodin'"  by    "sudden,"    "is  and  was"   by  "  Caiaphas," 
"mistakes"  by  "stakes,"  "  bewild'rin'  "  by  "children," 
"knows    his"    by    "disposes"    and    "here    boy,    or"    by 
"  blubber  for." 

One  could  multiply  these  by  ten  and  yet  not  exhaust 
the  list.  He  has  taken  a  leaf  out  of  Byron's  book,  and 
that  not  a  good  one. 


JOHN  MASEFIELD  248 

In  The  Widow  in  the  Bye  Street,  which  followed  close 
on  the  heels  of  The  Everlasting  Mercy,  published  in 
The  English  Review  of  February,  1912,  he  forsakes  the 
octosyllabic  couplet  for  a  seven-line  decasyllabic  stanza, 
rhyming  ababbcc  ;  a  vastly  improved  vehicle  for 
expressing  a  long  story  in  verse. 

It  treats  of  the  trials  of  a  widow  whose  only  son  falls 
into  a  very  obvious  trap  laid  for  him  by  a  woman  of  no 
reputation,  his  passionate  misplaced  love  for  her,  which 
results  in  his  murder  of  her  paramour,  Shepherd  Ern, 
and  his  consequent  execution. 

The  whole  treatment  and  finish  is  vastly  superior  to 
The  Everlasting  Mercy  ;  the  tragedy  is  heightened  and 
the  verses  are  less  diffuse  and  more  carefully  thought 
out.  The  first  part  of  the  poem  quickly  gives  you  the 
barest  facts  of  the  lives  of  each  of  the  principals,  and 
ends  thus  : 

So  the  four  souls  are  ranged,  the  chess-board  set, 

The  dark,  invisible  hand  of  secret  fate 

Brought  it  to  come  to  being  that  they  met 

After  so  many  years  of  lying  in  wait. 

While  we  least  think  it  he  prepares  his  Mate. 

Mate,  and  the  King's  pawn  played,  it  never  ceases 

Though  all  the  earth  is  dust  of  taken  pieces. 

This  verse,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  might  equally  well  be 
placed  at  the  head  of  all  his  longer  poems. 

There  is  something  of  Thomas  Hardy's  fatalism  in  all 
Mr  Masefield's  work. 

Follows  a  description  of  the  Fair  where  Jim  Gurney, 
the  hero,  meets  his  Anna  and  the  beginnings  of  his 
passion  for  her  : 

Love  is  a  flame  to  burn  out  human  wills, 

Love  is  a  flame  to  set  the  will  on  fire, 

Love  is  a  flame  to  cheat  men  into  mire, 

One  of  the  three,  we  make  love  what  we  choose. 


244  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

He  .   .  .  swept  out,  repeating  one  sweet  name, 
"Anna,  oh  Anna,"  to  the  evening  star. 
Anna  was  sipping  whisky  in  the  bar. 

The  Sophoclean  irony  of  the  last  two  lines  is  very  dear 
to  Mr  Masefield. 

Jim  is  led  into  deceiving  his  mother,  and  buying 
trinkets  for  his  Anna,  till  at  last  there  follows  the 
inevitable  scene,  where  his  mother  tries  to  make  him 
see  that  he  is  throwing  his  love  away  on  a  light  woman. 
The  dialogue  is  dramatic,  tense  and  real,  and  shows  the 
enormous  advance  the  poet  has  made  in  technique  on 
his  earlier  work.     It's  all  no  use. 

People  in  love  cannot  be  won  by  kindness 
And  opposition  makes  them  feel  like  martyrs. 

It  is  in  one  of  the  soliloquies  that  follow  that  there  occurs 
one  of  the  imperishable  thoughts  that  have  never  been 
so  expressed  before,  and  for  which  Mr  Masefield  is 
bound  to  outlive  this  age.  The  poor  old  mother, 
finding  her  pleading  of  no  avail,  in  bitter  anguish  cries  : 

Life's  a  long  headache  in  a  noisy  street. 

Anna,  meanwhile,  is  using  Jimmy  merely  as  a  bait  to 
bring  back  her  former  lover.  Shepherd  Em,  who  had 
been  errant  during  the  fair,  owing  to  the  attractions  of 
Gipsy  Bessie  ;  she  was  entirely  successful,  and  then 
immediately  has  no  more  use  for  Jim,  who  first  suspects, 
then 

Raging,  he  hurried  back  to  learn  the  truth. 

He  rushes  in  on  the  discovered  pair,  is  knocked 
out  by  the  Shepherd  and  makes  off  swearing 
revenge. 

It  reads  like  a  play  written  for  the  cinematograph. 


JOHN  MASEFIELD  245 

He  ran  down  to  the  water,  sensuous  thoughts  half 
killing  him. 

All  through  the  night  the  stream  ran  to  the  sea, 

The  different  water  always  saying  the  same. 

Cat-like  and  then  a  tinkle,  never  glee, 

A  lonely  little  child  alone  in  shame. 

Another  snapped  a  thorn  twig  when  he  came, 

It  drifted  down,  it  passed  the  Hazel  Mill, 

It  passed  the  Springs :  but  Jimmy  stayed  there  still. 

It  is  in  a  stanza  such  as  this  that  we  realise  the  vein  of 
truth  and  beauty,  bursting  to  be  expressed,  that  runs 
through  Mr  Masefleld. 
Whoever  bettered  that 

Lonely  little  child  alone  in  shame  ? 

Having  stayed  out  all  night,  Jim  goes  to  work,  and 
ill,  distraught,  asks  for  the  sack,  gets  it,  drinks  himself 
mad  while  his  mother  is  searching  for  him,  and  would 
have  found  and  saved  him  but  for  a  cruel,  malicious 
stroke  of  fate  : 

Whether  she'd  go  to  th'inn  and  find  her  son, 
Or  take  the  field  and  let  the  doom  be  done. 

Of  course  she  takes  the  field,  while  Jim  rushes  to  his 
destiny.  He  kills  Ern  with  one  blow  of  a  "  spudder  "  ; 
again  we  are  irresistibly  reminded  of  the  Playboy  ;  and 
then  at  once  he  becomes  sane  again. 

Man  cannot  call  the  brimming  instant  back  : 
Time's  an  affair  of  instants  spun  to  days ; 
If  man  must  make  an  instant  gold,  or  black, 
Let  him,  he  may,  but  Time  must  go  his  ways. 
Life  may  be  duller  for  an  instant's  blaze, 
Life's  an  affair  of  instants  spun  to  years  ; 
Instants  are  only  cause  of  all  these  tears. 

He  is  tried,  convicted,  converted  and  hanged.     Again  it 


246  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

falls  to  the  mother  to  utter  one  of  Masefield's  immortal 
lines  : 

God  warms  his  hands  at  man's  heart  when  he  prays." 

She  is  left  comfortless.,  beaten,  but  alive  : 

Some  of  life's  sad  ones  are  too  strong  to  die, 

and  we  are  left  on  a  note  of  pure  poetry  to  watch  the 
wandering  witless  ways  of  the  old  woman  as  she  walks 
singing  sad  songs  to  remind  her  of  Jim  who  is  coming 
back  to  her  soon. 

The  stars  are  placid  on  the  evening's  blue, 
Burning  like  eyes  so  calm,  so  unafraid 
Of  all  that  God  has  given  and  man  has  made. 
Burning  they  watch,  and  moth-like  owls  come  out, 
The  redbreast  warbles  shrilly  once  and  stops  ; 
The  homing  cowman  gives  his  dog  a  shout, 
The  lamps  are  lighted  in  the  village  shops. 
Silence  :  the  last  bird  passes :  in  the  copse 
The  hazels  cross  the  moon,  a  night-jar  spins, 
Dew  wets  the  grass,  the  nightingale  begins. 

No  finer  description  than  that  can  be  found  in  any 
poetry  of  our  day,  and  he  who  denies  that  Mr  Masefield 
is  a  poet  has  to  reckon  not  with  a  solitary  instance  like 
this,  but  with  stanza  after  stanza  of  a  like  beauty. 

The  whole  poem  shows  an  advance  in  every  depart- 
ment of  Mr  Masefield's  power.  He  has  a  better  grip 
of  his  subject,  he  digresses  and  moralises  less,  though  he 
still  does  so  too  much ;  there  is  more  real  beauty,  less 
licence  and  carelessness,  and  greater  cohesion  altogether 
than  in  The  Everlasting  Mercy. 

In  May,  1912,  he  published  a  little  known  poem, 
entitled  Biography,  of  inestimable  value  to  all  those 
who  would  know  something  of  the  man  behind  the 
artist.  Of  course,  as  we  expect,  there  is  the  usual 
panegyric  on  oceans  : 


JOHN  MASEFIELD  247 

By  many  waters  and  on  many  ways 
I  have  known  golden  instants  and  bright  days. 
The  night  alone  near  water  when  I  heard 
All  the  sea's  spirit  spoken  by  a  bird. 

There  ought  to  be  little  danger  of  our  forgetting,  but 
lest  we  should,  he  adds  : 

When  I  am  dust  my  penman  may  not  know 
Those  water-trampling  ships  which  make  me  glow, 
But  think  my  wonder  mad  and  fail  to  find 
Their  glory,  even  dimly,  from  my  mind, 
And  yet  they  made  me. 

His  Ballads  and  Poems,  if  nothing  else,  would  be 
sufficient  to  prove  to  any  critic  gifted  with  common- 
sense,  that  his  Coram  Street  days  were  not  his  happiest. 

London  has  been  my  prison  :  but  my  books, 

Hills  and  great  waters,  labouring  men  and  brooks, 

Ships  and  deep  friendships  and  remembered  days 

Which  even  now  set  all  my  mind  ablaze — 

— I  felt  the  hillside  thronged  by  souls  unseen, 

Who  knew  the  interest  in  me  and  were  keen 

That  man  alive  should  understand  man  dead 

— And  quickened  with  strange  hush  because  his  comer 

Sensed  a  strange  soul  alive  behind  the  summer. 


■&' 


The  whole  poem  is  a  revelation  and  leads  one  at  last 
to  what  we  had  been  expecting  for  so  long  :  the  epic 
of  the  sea,  the  prologue,  Ships,  appearing  in  July,  1912, 
and  the  poem  itself,  Dauber,  in  October  of  the  same 
year. 

The  former  is  a  catalogue  of  the  great  ships  of  yore 
that  made  the  Mersey  famous  through  the  world  : 

I  cannot  tell  their  wonder  nor  make  known 
Magic  that  once  thrilled  through  me  to  the  bone, 
But  all  men  praise  some  beauty,  tell  some  tale, 
Vent  a  high  mood  which  makes  the  rest  seem  pale, 
Pour  their  heart's  blood  to  nourish  one  green  leaf, 
Follow  some  Helen  for  her  gift  of  grief 


248  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

And  fail  in  what  they  mean,  whate'er  they  do : 
You  should  have  seen,  men  cannot  tell  to  you 
The  beauty  of  the  ships  of  that  my  city. 

Dauber  is  The  Ancient  Mariner  of  the  twentieth  century, 
with  these  differences.  Mr  Masefield  knows  the  sea  as 
no  poet  ever  has  before  ;  Falconer  in  his  Castaway  is 
the  nearest  approach,  and  he  is  poles  removed. 

The  poem  tells  the  story  of  a  young  farmer  who 
refused  to  carry  on  the  tradition  of  his  fathers,  but 
went  to  sea  in  order  to  paint  it  from  the  inside. 

It's  not  been  done,  the  sea,  not  yet  been  done, 
From  the  inside  by  one  who  really  knows, 
I'd  give  up  all  if  I  could  be  the  one, 
But  art  comes  dear  the  way  the  money  goes. 

He  had  to  work  his  way  out  in  a  vessel  rounding  Cape 
Horn,  and  in  pursuing  his  art  to  encounter  the  gibes, 
and  worse,  of  his  mates,  who  with  some  of  the  Public 
School  instinct  towards  what  it  cannot  understand, 
did  all  in  their  power  to  harass  and  upset  him. 

Three  reefers  slashed  his  canvases  to  ribbons,  as  a 
result  of  which  he  made  an  ineffectual  appeal  to  the 
captain  and  became  the  laughing-stock  of  the  crew. 

To  one  of  the  reefers,  however,  he  communicates  in 
a  confidential  mood  his  life  story,  how  he  had  broken 
his  father's  heart  for  this  whim,  this  passion,  this 
insensate  craving  for  painting  and  the  sea : 

That's  what  I  loved,  water,  and  time  to  read. 

One  day  he  got  a  job  below  the  bridge,  and  then  saw 
for  the  first  time  a  clipper. 

That  altered  life  for  me  :  I  had  never  seen 
A  ship  before,  for  all  my  thought  of  ships : 
And  there  was  this  great  clipper  like  a  queen, 
With  a  white  curl  of  bubbles  at  her  lips, 
All  made  of  beauty  to  the  stern's  ellipse, 


JOHN  MASEFIELD  249 

Her  ensign  ruffling  red,  her  bunts  in  pile, 
Beauty  and  strength  together,  wonder,  style. 
I  wasn't  happy  then  :  I  felt  too  keenly 
How  hard  it  is  to  paint :  but  when  I  saw 
Her  masts  across  the  river  rising  queenly, 
Built  out  of  so  much  chaos  brought  to  law, 
I  learned  the  power  of  knowing  how  to  draw, 
Of  beating  thought  into  the  perfect  line, 
I  vowed  to  make  that  power  of  beauty  mine. 

Many  storms  were  encountered  before  they  reached 
the  Horn,  all  which  tested  Dauber's  manhood  and 
stirred  him  on  to  high  effort,  so  that  by  suffering  pain 
a  little  hour  he  might  be  able  to  draw  that  line  of  sailors' 
faces  sweating  the  sail,  their  passionate  play  and  change, 
their  might,  their  misery,  their  tragic  power  in  order 
that  men  the  world  over  should  understand  their 
feeling  through  his  power  of  portrayal. 

Then  follows  that  wonderful  fifth  canto,  telling  of 
the  rounding  of  the  Horn,  in  which  the  poet  rises  to 
heights  he  never  reached  before,  and  which  alone  would 
suffice  to  give  him  a  reputation  above  all  living  writers 
had  he  written  nothing  else.  No  description  of  a 
storm  at  sea  has  ever  approached  this  one  ;  the  words 
pour  out,  wild,  passionate,  pell-mell,  pregnant  with 
reality,  comparable  only  with  passages  in  The  Inferno  : 
it  is  far  too  long  to  quote  :  I  can  only  implore  anyone 
who  has  not  yet  read  it  to  buy,  borrow  or  steal  a  copy 
to-day. 

Scenes  of  horror  are  ushered  in  by  this  superb 
couplet : 

then  from  the  sea 
Came  a  cold  sudden  breath  that  made  the  hair 
Stiff  in  the  neck  as  though  Death  whispered  there. 

The  reader  feels  the  ghastly  dizziness  that  assails  the 
neophyte  when  he  finds  himself  for  the  first  time  in  the 


250  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

rigging  in  a  gale :  the  frozen  hands,  the  cold  sweat  of 
fear,  and  all  the  tortures  of  the  damned  that  Dauber 
had  to  undergo.  Somehow  he  survived,  but  with  a 
peculiar  irony  as  dear  to  Mr  Masefield's  heart  as  to 
Thomas  Hardy's,  he  escapes  only  to  fall  from  the  fore- 
topgallant  yard  weather  arm  shortly  afterwards  in  the 
last  gale  before  Valparaiso  :  he  just  breathed  :  "  It  will 
go  on,"  not  knowing  his  meaning  rightly,  but  he  spoke 

With  the  intenseness  of  a  fading  soul 

Whose  share  of  Nature's  fire  turns  to  smoke, 

Whose  hand  on  Nature's  wheel  loses  control. 

u  It  will  go  on/'  he  cried  aloud,  and  passed. 

And  almost  at  once  afterwards  they  reached  the  haven. 

Altogether  this  is  the  most  powerful  poem  that  Mr 
Masefield  has  written,  because  his  whole  heart  and  soul 
were  in  his  work  :  he  has  the  passion  to  paint  for  us  in 
words  what  Dauber  would  have  painted  on  canvas,  the 
lives  and  ways  of  those  who  go  down  to  the  sea  in  ships 
and  occupy  their  business  in  great  waters. 

Yet  wTith  it  all,  as  in  the  later  work  of  Shakespeare, 
there  is  an  incredible  carelessness  as  if  he  could  not 
restrain  his  flow  of  words  but  had  written  the  whole 
poem  at  a  sitting.  Unnecessary  alliterations,  stupid 
repetitions  of  words  like  "multitudinous,"  extraordinary 
and  gross  tamperings  with  the  metre,  all  serve  to  weaken 
the  general  effect  and  give  the  reader  the  impression 
that  it  is  the  result  of  one  gigantic  effort  inspired 
nearly  throughout,  but  so  good  as  not  to  be  retouched 
again.  "  By  God  ;  it  is  good,  take  it  or  leave  it," 
he  might  say  with  Ben  Jonson,  and  leave  it  we  must 
at  that. 

The  Daffodil  Fields  followed  in  February,  1913,  not 
in  February,  1912,  as  Mr  Masefield  says  in  his  reprinted 
edition,  published  in  October,  1913.     This,  like  all  his 


JOHN  MASEFIELD  251 

later  work,  is  in  the  seven-lined  stanza  of  The  Widow 
in  the  Bye  Street. 

It  is  in  epitome  Enoch  Arden  retold  and  incidentally 
very  much  better.  It  starts  with  the  dying  request 
of  Nicholas  Gray  that  his  two  friends,  Occleve  and 
Keir,  should  look  after  his  wayward  son,  Michael,  after 
his  death,  and  if  possible  see  that  he  married  Keir's 
daughter  Mary,  who  was  passionately  devoted  to  him. 
They  give  their  promise ;  the  old  man  dies — Michael 
comes  home,  but  not  for  long. 

I  want  to  go 
Somewhere  where  man  has  never  used  a  plough, 
Nor  ever  read  a  book ;  where  clean  winds  blow, 
And  passionate  blood  is  not  its  owner's  foe, 
And  land  is  for  the  asking  for  it. 

He  decides  to  go  to  the  Plate,  but  in  a  scene  of  superb 
beauty  makes  love  to  Mary  and  secures  her  promise  to 
wait  three  years  for  him. 

Mr  Masefield  has  seldom  written  more  exquisite 
poetry  than  that  in  which  he  describes  the  night  of  their 
leave-taking. 

Still  as  high  June,  the  very  water's  noise 

Seemed  but  a  breathing  of  the  earth  :  the  flowers 

Stood  in  the  dim  like  souls  without  a  voice. 

The  wood's  conspiracy  of  occult  powers 

Drew  all  about  them,  and  for  hours  on  hours 

No  murmur  shook  the  oaks,  the  stars  did  house 

Their  lights  like  lamps  upon  these  never-moving  boughs. 

June's  very  breast  was  bare  this  night  of  nights. 
Moths  blundered  up  against  them,  grays  and  whites 
Moved  on  the  darkness  where  the  moths  were  out, 
Nosing  for  sticky  sweet  with  trembling  uncurled  snout. 

Would  that  the  poet  would  give  us  more  of  this. 
The  whole  scene  is  worthy  to  rank  with  Richard 


252  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

Feverel's  immortal  meeting  with  Lucy.  It  is  all  too 
short :  in  a  few  stanzas 

The  flag  waved,  the  engine  snorted,  then 
Slowly  the  couplings  tautened,  and  the  train 
Moved,  bearing  off  from  her  her  man  of  men  ; 
She  looked  towards  its  going,  blind  with  pain. 

He  soon  forgets  her,  however,  in  the  new  country  and 
lives  with  a  Spanish  beauty,  not  even  answering  his 
first  love's  letters.  By  a  rather  strained  poetic  licence 
Mary's  ardent  but  earthy,  steadfast,  disappointed 
lover  at  home,  Lion  Occleve,  has  bred  a  wonderful 
bull,  which  he  takes  to  Michael's  country  to  sell,  meets 
him,  implores  him  to  give  up  his  mistress  and  come  back 
to  Mary,  who  is  wasting  away  for  want  of  him,  all, 
however,  to  no  purpose.  Lion  returns  to  Mary  with 
his  woeful  tale,  and  after  months  of  pleading  he  manages 
to  make  her  marry  him. 

Michael  hears  of  the  wedding  and  immediately 
realising  all  that  he  is  losing,  impetuously  rushes  home, 
and  after  failing  to  find  her  in  her  own  house,  into 
which  he  crept,  his  better  nature  urges  him  to  go  away  ; 
he  meets  her  by  accident  and  the  tragedy  hastens  to  its 
finish.  At  once  Mary  returns  to  Lion's  house,  throws 
her  ring  on  the  table  and,  deaf  to  all  entreaties  and 
threats,  goes  off  to  live  with  Michael.  Lion  is  then 
roused  and  the  end,  though  curiously  protracted,  is  near. 

One  day  Lion  meets  Michael  and  offers  him  his 
hedging-hook  as  a  weapon,  himself  using  a  stake  drawn 
from  the  hedge.  Michael,  who  has  obviously  some- 
thing of  vast  importance  to  say,  is  effectually  prevented 
from  uttering  it  until  each  has  mortally  wounded  the 
other  :  then  only  has  he  time  to  gasp  out  in  his  dying 
breath  that  Mary  and  he  had  agreed  to  separate,  that 
she  was  at  that  moment  on  her  way  to  rejoin  Lion. 


JOHN  MASEFIELD  253 

She  comes,  sees  Michael  dead  and,  weeping  bitterly, 
laments  the  murder  of  her  only  real  love  :  her  heart 
breaks  and  the  tragedy  bed  is  loaded  with  three  corpses. 

A  gruesome  story,  curiously  uneven.  The  language 
which  the  disputants  employ  is  half  that  of  the  cultured 
scholar,  half  that  of  the  farmer  ;   never  consistent. 

There  is,  too,  the  quaint  conceit  of  the  daffodil  fields 
brought  in  as  a  last  line  to  every  canto,  quite  un- 
necessarily :  the  title  has  really  no  bearing  on  the  tale 
whatever,'  except  that  Mr  Masefield  likes  to  digress  as 
to  a  point  of  seasons  whenever  a  fresh  nail  is  driven 
into  the  coffin  of  the  luckless  trio. 

There  is  again  much  carelessness  and  a  redundancy 
that  threatens  to  become  an  obsession.  Here  is  one 
example  out  of  about  thirty  : 

A  spring  comes  bubbling  up  there,  cold  as  glass,, 

It  bubbles  down,  crusting  the  leaves  with  lime, 

Babbling  the  self-same  song  that  it  has  sung  through  lime. 

Here  is  one  even  worse  : 

Counting  the  dreary  time,  the  dreary  beat 
Of  dreary  minutes  dragging  through  the  day. 

Surely  Mr  Masefield  cannot  believe  that  such  tricks 
make  for  effectiveness.  His  powers  of  description  are 
not  dulled,  he  has  wonderful  fertility  of  language  and 
brings  his  characters  to  play  their  puppet  parts  with 
the  best  possible  skill  that  verse  can  command,  but 
there  is  still  something  lacking. 

It  is  not  these  long  poems  at  all  that  make  Mr  Mase- 
field the  great  poet.  I  have  purposely  left  his  great 
work,  and  curiously  enough  his  least  known  and  earliest, 
till  the  last. 

Ballads  and  Poems  were  published  years  before  any 
of  the  long  poems,  and  some  of  the  best  stuff  in  them 


254  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

was  written,  he  tells  us,  in  his  adolescence,  under  the 
influence  (it  is  obvious)  of  Rudyard  Kipling. 

This  little  volume,  containing  just  one  hundred  pages, 
has  more  real  poetry  in  it  than  all  his  other  output 
added  together  :  the  true  magic  is  rung  in  nearly  every 
line  :  words  of  most  ordinary  significance  assume  a 
heightened  sense,  and  music  of  a  more  poignant  and 
haunting  fragrance  than  we  meet  with  elsewhere  in  his 
writings,  so  much  so  that,  admire  as  we  do  his  narrative 
poems,  we  feel  (most  of  us)  certain  that  his  true  voca- 
tion is  the  short  lyric,  not  the  metric  annals  of  the  sordid 
and  the  wretched. 

On  the  first  page  we  light  on  a  verse  totally  unlike 
anything  in  the  longer  poems.  It  is  called  The  Ballad 
of  Sir  Bors. 

Would  I  could  win  some  quiet  and  rest  and  a  little  ease, 

In  the  cool  grey  hush  of  the  dusk,  in  the  dim  green  place  of 

the  trees, 
Where  the  birds  are  singing,  singing,  crying  aloud 
The  song  of  the  red,  red  rose  that  blossoms  beyond  the  seas. 

There  is  more  than  a  flash  of  resemblance  to  La  Belle 
Dame  Sans  Merci  in  that  stanza.  Further  on  in  the 
same  poem  we  come  across  the  line, 

A  star  will  glow  like  a  note  God  strikes  on  the  silver  bell, 

a  line  that  lives  in  the  memory  when  all  thought  of  Jim 
Gurney,  Saul  Kane,  Michael  Keir,  and  the  rest  of  them, 
is  entirely  obliterated.  How  different,  again,  is  Cargoes, 
now  better  known  owing  to  the  music  that  has  been 
written  for  it. 

Quinquireme  of  Nineveh  from  distant  Ophir, 

Rowing  home  to  haven  in  sunny  Palestine, 

With  a  cargo  of  ivory, 

And  apes  and  peacocks, 

Sandalwood,  cedarwood  and  sweet  white  wine. 


JOHN  MASEFIELD  255 

Dirty  British  Coaster  with  a  salt-caked  smoke-stack, 

Butting  through  the  Channel  in  the  mad  March  days, 

With  a  cargo  of  Tyne  coal, 

Road-rails,  pig-lead, 

Firewood,  iron-ware  and  cheap  tin  trays. 

It  is  easy  to  cavil  at  this  sort  of  thing  because  it  is  new 
and  offends  the  susceptibilities  of  some  critics,  but 
there  can  be  little  doubt  that  no  truer  picture  has  been 
painted  in  less  words. 

Then  there  are  ballads,  The  Old  Bold  Mate  of  Henry 
Morgan,  that  John  Silver  ought  to  have  sung. 

Sir  Arthur  Quiller-Couch  recognised  the  durability 
of  one  of  his  poems  when  he  included  Beauty  in  The 
Oxford  Book  of  English  Verse. 

I  have  seen  dawn  and  sunset  on  moors  and  windy  hills 

Coming  in  solemn  beauty  like  slow  old  tunes  of  Spain  : 
1  have  seen  the  lady  April  bringing  the  daffodils, 

Bringing  the  spring  grass  and  the  soft  warm  April  rain. 
I  have   heard  the   song  of  the  blossoms  and  the  old  chant 

of  the  sea, 
And   seen  strange  lands  from  under  the  arched  white  sails 

of  ships  : 
But  the    loveliest   things  of  beauty  God  ever   has    showed 
to  me, 
Are  her  voice  and  her  hair  and  eyes,  and  the  dear  red 
curve  of  her  lips. 

The  whole  feminine  race  may  envy  the  woman  to  whom 
that,  in  common  with  everything  he  has  written,  is 
dedicated.     Panegyric  and  love  could  rise  no  higher. 
His  three  sonnets  : — 


and 


(i.)  Her  heart  is  always  doing  lovely  things, 
(ii.)  Being  her  friend  I  do  not  care,  not  I, 


(hi.)  Born  for  nought  else,  for  nothing  but  for  this, 


256  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

just  accentuate  the  beauty  of  the  quoted  hymn  of 
adoration. 

True  poetry  has  been  defined  as  the  retelling  of 
great  events  remembered  in  passivity,  heightened  by 
language  that  could  be  uttered  in  no  other  way,  musical, 
magic,  from  the  soul. 

For  Mr  Masefield  this  is  the  true  touchstone.  Each 
event  seen  and  lived  through,  leaves  its  impress  on  his 
poetic  soul,  and  he  strives  to  express  in  words  what  has 
thrilled  him  through  and  through  with  beauty. 

He  may  thank  God  for  the  perceptive  vision,  he  is 
endowed  with  divine  powers  ;  those  of  us  who  love  him 
most  watch  with  trepidation  lest  he  should  be  led  from 
the  path  in  which  his  real  genius  lies  to  prostitute  his 
talents  and  pander  to  a  taste  which  revels  in  his 
"  bloodies,"  his  audacious  sensuality,  his  excerpts 
from  the  lowest  Sunday  papers. 

Meanwhile  we  hug  the  few  Ballads  and  Poems  we 
own  the  closer,  reading  and  rereading  them  until  he 
comes  back  to  us. 

We  would  leave  him  with  one  final  warning.  Could 
he  but  read  the  reams  of  rubbish  with  which  his  so- 
called  imitators  are  flooding  their  studies,  he  would 
pause  before  pursuing  his  present  path  further. 

As  a  playwright  of  poetic  drama,  he  has  no  living 
equal,  neither  has  he  peer  in  ballad  or  lyric.  Let  him 
realise  his  limitations,  and  give  us  in  the  years  to  come 
more  of  the  Coram  Street  and  Tettenhall  genius  and 
less  of  the  world-famous  original  poet  of  these  last  four 
years. 


X 

RUPERT   BROOKE 

A  young  Apollo,  golden-haired, 

Stands  dreaming  on  the  verge  of  strife, 

Magnificently  unprepared 

For  the  long  littleness  of  life. 

IN  the  first  throes  of  anguish  which  every  man 
who  knew  the  poet  experienced  on  hearing  that 
Rupert  Brooke  was  dead  it  seemed  incredible 
that  one  so  absolutely  the  incarnation  of  youth  and 
spring  could  have  vanished  from  us  for  ever  ;  but  later 
this  feeling  gave  way  to  another  which  will  probably 
remain  as  the  more  lasting  ;  it  now  seems  equally  im- 
possible that  he  could  ever  have  lived  ;  he  was  almost 
too  good  to  be  true ;  he  was  certainly  one  of  those 
Avhom  the  gods  love,  ev^s  koI  eufiaOrjs. 

The  son  of  a  house-master  at  Rugby,  he  was  himself 
educated  there,  and  was  successful  both  as  a  youthful 
poet  and  as  an  athlete,  for  he  gained  his  colours  for 
cricket  and  football  in  addition  to  winning  the  school 
English  Verse  Prize.  In  after  years,  at  King's  College, 
Cambridge,  he  took  a  second-class  in  the  Classical 
Tripos,  and  was  elected  to  a  fellowship  as  the  result  of 
a  thesis  on  Webster. 

Deciding  to  travel,  he  was  led  by  the  spirit  of  Steven- 
son "  across  the  plains  "  to  the  South  Sea  Islands,  and 
wrote  vivid  prose  impressions,  which  were  printed  in 
The  Westminster  Gazette.  He  eventually  returned  with 
the  idea  of  settling  down  at  the  old  Vicarage,  Grant- 
chester,  in  order  to  lecture  to  undergraduates  of  his 
university.     The  war  put  a  stop  to  this,  however,  and 

R  257 


258  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

he  joined  the  Royal  Naval  Division  instead,  underwent 
the  horrors  of  Antwerp,  came  back  unscathed,  and 
after  a  short  training  at  Blandford  was  sent  out  to  the 
Dardanelles.  Early  in  April,  1915,  he  contracted  sun- 
stroke ;  septicaemia  then  mysteriously  set  in,  and  he  died 
aboard  a  French  hospital  ship  on  Shakespeare's  supposed 
death-day,  and  lies  buried  in  the  Island  of  Lemnos,  the 
greatest  poet  of  his  time.  It  reads  like  legend  ;  it  is  so 
exactly  what  each  of  us  would  have  demanded  of  our 
fairy  godmother  had  we  had  the  chance. 

That  nothing  should  be  denied  him,  to  his  great 
intellectual  gifts  were  added  an  exceptional  charm  of 
manner  and  beauty  of  form.  This  bodily  beauty  had, 
I  think,  a  direct  influence  on  his  work.  In  common 
with  many  thinking  men  of  his  age  (he  was  only  twenty- 
seven  when  he  died),  he  lived  in  a  state  of  continual 
protest  against  the  merely  pretty  ;  he  was  in  deadly 
fear  of  falling  into  a  flattered  literary  career,  of  winning 
fame  as  one  more  beautiful  poet  of  beautiful  themes, 
so  he  ran  counter  to  the  accepted  tradition  into  violence 
and  coarseness  for  salvation.  The  same  tendency  may 
with  equal  certainty  be  traced  in  the  work  of  Masefield, 
Cannan,  D.  H.  Lawrence  and  Wilfrid  Gibson. 

The  temptation  to  generalise  on  this  point  is  insidious 
but  futile.  I  will,  however,  attempt  to  sum  up  in  one 
sentence  what  I  believe  to  be  the  guiding  principle  of 
the  twentieth-century  poet  with  regard  to  this  :  "A 
thing  is  not  necessarily  beautiful  because  the  majority 
think  it  to  be  so  ;  the  only  way  to  arrive  at  a  sense  of 
real  beauty  is  to  cast  out  fear,  become  an  iconoclast,  to 
prove  all  things  and  to  hold  fast  that  which  we  find  to 
be  good." 

The  result  of  such  a  point  of  view  on  the  world  can 
easily  be  imagined  ;  strange  labels  are  attached  by  the 
conventional  critic  to  the  poetry  which  makes  him  un- 


RUPERT  BROOKE  259 

comfortable,  to  the  work  which  he  cannot  understand. 
Cannan  is  alliteratively  styled  cynic,  Lawrence  bour- 
geois, Masefield  blasphemous  and  Brooke  hard,  savage, 
realistic,  loveless.  "  Shamelessly  undodgy,"  said  Henry 
James  of  the  younger  generation.  It  is  worth  while 
seeing  how  far  this  applies  to  Rupert  Brooke. 

He  will  write  you  a  sonnet  on  Dawn,  starting  with  the 
arresting  line  : 

Opposite  me  two  Germans  snore  and  sweat, 

written  in  the  train  between  Bologna  and  Milan,  second- 
class.  He  describes  the  windows,  slimy-wet  with  a 
night's  fcetor,  the  age-long  night  in  the  stuffy,  foul 
carriage,  the  effect  on  his  companions  : 

One  of  them  wakes  and  spits  and  sleeps  again. 

In  Wagner  he  pictures  the  effect  of  music  on  the  fat, 
greasy  sensualist  : 

The  music  swells.     His  gross  legs  quiver.  .  .  . 

And  all  the  while,  in  perfect  time, 

His  pendulous  stomach  hangs  a-shaking. 

Menelaus  and  Helen  almost  ranks  with  Troilus  and 
Cressida  as  a  gross  attack  on  all  that  we  hold  most 
precious  in  legend  and  myth.  No  Darby  and  Joan 
about  this  famous  pair  when  they  fall  into  the  sere  and 
yellow  leaf : 

Often  he  wonders  why  on  earth  he  went 
Troyward,  or  why  poor  Paris  ever  came. 

Oft  she  weeps,  gummy-eyed  and  impotent ; 

Her  dry  shanks  twitch  at  Paris'  mumbled  name. 

So  Menelaus  nagged  ;  and  Helen  cried  ; 

And  Paris  slept  on  by  Scamander  side. 

Even  more  famous  are  his  Channel  Passage,  with  its 
physically  disgusting  descriptions  of  the  sea-sick  lover, 


260  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

and  Jealousy,  where  we  are  shown  unlovely  love- 
making  grown  old. 

To  Brooke  it  was  hypocrisy  to  restrain  the  direct 
expression  of  himself  out  of  consideration  for  others. 
This  side  of  his  work  is  important  as  reflecting  the 
natural  ebullition  of  youthful  spirits.  Mr  Harold 
Monro  calls  all  these  poems  ;t  jokes  "  ;  a  good  joke,  he 
says,  is,  after  all,  more  stimulating  than  the  best  piece 
of  advice.  It  is  the  most  necessary  thing  for  a  poet  to 
be  able  to  laugh  well.  His  principal  failing  seems  to 
have  been  a  sort  of  fear  lest  he  should  be  taken  seriously. 
If  he  thought  he  had  loved  too  well  he  would  laugh 
away  his  feelings  in  a  horrible  poem  like  Jealousy  or 
Ambarvalia. 

In  point  of  fact,  despite  Henry  James's  label  of 
"  shamelessly  undodgy  "  as  applied  to  the  youthful 
poets  of  to-day  as  if  it  were  a  new  thing,  not  one  of 
these  poems  in  conception  is  new  at  all.  I  know  that 
it  is  commonly  accepted  that  the  genius  of  the  twentieth 
century  owns  to  no  masters  in  his  craft ;  he  must  be 
above  all  things  a  pioneer,  hacking  his  way  ruthlessly 
through  virgin  jungle  ;  but  Rupert  Brooke,  at  any  rate, 
is  in  this  entirely  at  variance  with  his  contemporaries. 
What  makes  his  work  shine  so  far  beyond  that  of  any 
other  man  of  his  age  is  just  this  characteristic  :  he  does 
lean  upon  two  giants,  John  Webster  and  John  Donne, 
great  geniuses  both,  but  each,  unfortunately  for  his 
reputation,  overshadowed  by  a  greater  man.  Webster 
is  only  second  to  Shakespeare  in  tragic  intensity ; 
Donne  is  only  not  the  finest  poet  of  the  seventeenth 
century  because  Milton  happened  to  live  about  the  same 
time. 

Neither  man  is  even  yet  recognised  at  his  true  worth, 
although  Charles  Lamb  did  his  best  for  the  one,  and 
Browning  for  the  other. 


RUPERT  BROOKE  261 

In  Webster,  Rupert  Brooke  found  realism — there  are 
passages  in  The  White  Devil  and  The  Duchess  of  Malfi 
much  more  shamelessly  undodgy  than  anything  in 
Brooke— vigour,  and  an  intellect  as  scintillating  as  his 
own.  a  writer  whose  thoughts  toppled  over  pell-mell 
into  a  wealth  of  simile  and  metaphor  as  sane  and  apt 
as  those  of  Shakespeare  and  Arnold,  an  exuberance  of 
beauty  made  all  the  more  conspicuous  by  the  brusque, 
harsh,  unmusical  lines  that  compassed  it  about,  a 
genius  so  audacious  that  he  could  afford,  like  Shake- 
speare in  his  famous  five  "  nevers  "  in  King  Lear,  to 
rise  to  those  heights  of  sublimity  that  are  so  perilously 
near  the  ridiculous  as  to  make  us  shiver  with  apprehen- 
sion while  we  read,  only  to  thrill  with  ecstasy  afterwards 
when  we  realise  that  the  dramatist  has  o'ertopped  man's 
expectations  and  for  a  moment  given  us  a  glimpse  into 
the  unknown.     Everyone  knows  the  lines  : 

Vittoria.  I  am  lost  for  ever. 

Brachiano.   How  miserable  a  thing  it  is  to  die 
'Mongst  women  howling. 

or  the  : 

I  have  caught  an  everlasting  cold  :  I  have  lost  my  voice 
most  irrecoverably, 

in  The  Duchess  of  Malfi. 

Rupert  Brooke  owed  much  to  a  dramatist  whose  sure- 
ness  of  touch  could  lead  him  to  write  the  line  that  has 
been  said  to  be  the  high- water  mark  of  Romanticism  : 

Cover  her  face  :  mine  eyes  dazzle  :  she  died  young, 

to  a  man  who  could  heap  horror  on  horror,  gloomy 
fatalism  on  melancholic  madness,  and  yet  know  that 
he  was  one  of  those  rare  spirits  who  had  achieved  the 
supreme  ideal  of  tragedy  in  purging  the  emotions  by 
terror  and  pity. 


262  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

You  can  trace  quite  easily  all  these  different  facets 
of  Webster's  craft  in  Rupert  Brooke's  work,  but  his 
allegiance  to  John  Donne  was  even  more  loyal,  his  debt 
infinitely  greater. 

When  in  the  fulness  of  time  justice  is  done  to  the 
burning  vitality,  the  clarity  of  vision,  the  fertility  of 
imagination,  the  amazing  intellectual  versatility,  the 
heightened  humour,  and  the  true  sense  of  beauty  per- 
vading all  Brooke's  work,  then  and  then  only  will  the 
part  that  Donne  played  in  the  making  of  Rupert  Brooke 
be  adequately  understood. 

What  drove  Brooke  to  Donne  was,  of  course,  his 
recognition  of  the  similarity  of  their  tastes  ;  just  as  the 
Victorians  saw  nothing  in  Donne,  because  he  was  as 
diametrically  opposed  to  their  point  of  view  as  Samuel 
Butler  and  Meredith  were,  so  any  individual  man  or 
clique  will,  in  spite  of  Ruskin's  advice,  try  to  find 
inspiration  in  the  genius  to  whom  he  or  it  most  naturally 
approximates.  Though  this  is  a  truism,  it  needs  say- 
ing ;  for  there  is  every  likelihood  of  some  such  absurd 
myth  as  the  following  becoming  part  of  the  stock-in- 
trade  of  Brooke's  critics. 

Donne's  first  published  poem  was  written  while 
serving  in  the  Royal  Naval  Division  under  the  Earl  of 
Essex  before  Cadiz,  and  is  dedicated  to  a  Cambridge 
man  whose  name  was  Brooke  :  "A  unique  coincidence 
with  scarcely  a  parallel  in  the  world  of  letters.  This  is 
what  drove  Brooke  of  1914  to  Donne  "  !  Of  course  it 
is  unique  ;  all  coincidences  are  ;  but  it  is  most  decidedly 
not  what  drove  Rupert  to  John.  Rupert  Brooke  is 
simply  John  Donne  come  to  life  again,  a  reincarnation. 
We  are  told  by  Professor  Grierson  that  Donne's  intense 
individuality  was  always  eager  to  find  a  North-West 
Passage  of  its  own,  pressed  its  curious  and  sceptical 
questioning  into    every  corner  of  love  and   life  and 


RUPERT  BROOKE  263 

religion,  explored  unsuspected  depths,  exploited  new  dis- 
covered paradoxes,  and  turned  its  discoveries  always  into 
poetry  of  the  closely  packed,  artificial  style  which  was 
all  his  own.     Here  is  a  poem  of  Brooke's,  called  Heaven: 

Fish  (fly-replete,  in  depth  of  June, 

Dawdling  away  their  wat'ry  noon) 

Ponder  deep  wisdom,  dark  or  clear, 

Each  secret  fishy  hope  or  fear. 

Fish  say,  they  have  their  Stream  and  Pond  : 

But  is  there  anything  Beyond  ?  .   .   . 

We  darkly  know,  by  Faith  we  cry, 

The  Future  is  not  Wholly  Dry.   .   .   . 

But  somewhere,  beyond  Space  and  Time, 

Is  wetter  water,  slimier  slime.   .   .   . 

Unfading  moths,  immortal  flies, 

And  the  worm  that  never  dies. 

And  in  that  Heaven  of  all  their  wish, 

There  shall  be  no  more  land,  say  fish. 

Doesn't  this  exactly  fit  the  criticism  applied  to 
Donne  ?  Here,  too,  are  what  Doctor  Johnson  called 
"  the  quaint  conceits  "  and  "  the  blasphemous  obscenity 
of  the  metaphysical  school."  "  Almost  too  clever," 
says  Gilbert  Murray,  "  to  be  poetry  at  all  "  ;  there  is  in 
this  that  astringency  which  we  associate  with  ammonia 
in  the  bath  ;  we  find  it  in  Donne,  Meredith,  Swift, 
Browning,  Dryden,  Pope,  Churchill,  Byron,  Butler  and 
Burns  (a  mere  handful  of  names)  and  practically  no- 
where else  in  English  literature.  To  label  it  as  satire 
and  merely  to  leave  it  at  that  is  to  miss  half  the  point 
of  it.  It  is  worth  noting  that  Donne,  too,  had  looked 
not  at  heaven  but  at  love  from  the  fish's  point  of  view 
in  a  parody  of  Marlowe's  exquisite  Come  live  with  me 
and  be  my  love,  for  it  but  adds  a  fresh  rivet  to  my 
theory  of  debts  and  reincarnation. 

It  has  also  been  said  of  Donne  that  he  burst  passion- 
ately and  rudely  into  the  enclosed  garden  of  sentiment 


264  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

and  illusion,  pulling  up  the  gay-coloured  tangled  weeds 
that  choked  thoughts,  planting  the  seeds  of  fresh  in- 
vention. Where  his  forerunners  had  been  idealist, 
epicurean,  or  adoring,  he  was  brutal,  cynical  and 
immitigably  realist. 

How  can  we  find  ?     How  can  we  rest?     How  can 
We,  being  gods,  find  joy,  or  peace,  being  man  ? 
We,  the  gaunt  zanies  of  a  witless  Fate, 
Who  love  the  unloving,  and  the  lover  hate, 
Forget  the  moment  ere  the  moment  slips, 
Kiss  with  blind  eyes  that  seek  beyond  the  lips, 
Who  want,  and  know  not  what  we  want,  and  cry 
With  crooked  mouths  for  Heaven,  and  throw  it  by. 

You  can  see  it  in  Kindliness  : 

When  Love  has  changed  to  kindliness.  .   .  . 
That  time  when  all  is  over,  and 
Hand  never  flinches,  brushing  hand  : 
And  blood  lies  quiet,  for  all  you're  near ; 
And  it's  but  spoken  words  we  hear, 
Where  trumpets  sang :  when  the  mere  skies 
Are  stranger  and  nobler  than  your  eyes ; 
And  flesh  is  flesh,  was  flame  before ; 
And  infinite  hungers  leap  no  more 
In  the  chance  swaying  of  your  dress. 

Or  in  The  Wayfarers  : 

Each  crawling  day 
Will  pale  a  little  3-our  scarlet  lips,  each  mile 
Dull  the  dear  pain  of  your  remembered  face. 

In  The  Beginning  : 

I'll  curse  the  thing  that  once  you  were, 
Because  it  is  changed  and  pale  and  old, 
(Lips  that  were  scarlet,  hair  that  was  gold). 

The  underlying  thought  in  all  these  comes  straight 
from  Donne.  I  could  quote  a  thousand  instances. 
I  Tore  is  one  : 


RUPERT  BROOKE  265 

Who  would  not  laugh  at  me  if  I  should  say 
I  saw  a  flash  of  powder  last  a  day  ? 

or  : 

Changed  loves  are  but  changed  sorts  of  meat : 
And  when  he  hath  the  kernel  eat 
Who  doth  not  fling  away  the  shell  ? 

Or,  to  hark  back  for  a  moment  to  the  series  which  I 
quoted  on  Brooke's  realism,  does  not  this  strike  a 
harmonious  chord  : 

And  like  a  bunch  of  ragged  carrots  stand 
The  short  swollen  fingers  of  thy  gouty  hand  ? 

How  he  huddles  a  new  thought  on  the  one  before  it, 
before  the  first  has  had  time  to  express  itself ;  how  he 
sees  things  and  analyses  emotions  so  swiftly  and  subtly 
himself  that  he  forgets  the  slower  comprehensions  of 
his  readers ;  how  he  always  trembles  on  the  verge  of 
the  inarticulate ;  how  his  restless  intellect  finds  new 
and  subtler  shades  of  emotion  and  thought  invisible 
to  other  pairs  of  eyes,  and  cannot,  because  speech  is 
modelled  on  the  average  of  our  intelligence,  find  words 
to  express  them.  This  might  be  a  criticism  of  Brown- 
ing ;  it  really  is  a  criticism  of  Donne,  and  it  exactly 
describes  such  a  poem  of  Brooke's  as  Dining-Room  Tea. 

But  you  will  have  noticed  here  that  a  new  note  has 
crept  in.  I  have  already  commented  on  his  fear  of 
becoming  the  beautiful  poet  of  beautiful  themes ;  he 
hated  most,  I  imagine,  the  decadents  and  their  school ; 
but  he  has  another  not  less  awful  dread  ;  you  see  it  in 
Menelaus  and  Helen  and  in  Kindliness  :  the  thought 
that  he  might  one  day  grow  old,  that  a  time  might 
conceivably  come  "  when  infinite  longings  leap  no 
more,"  terrified  him. 

This  constantly  recurring  obsession  would  have 
driven  him  mad  (he  was,  in  common  with  many  other 


266  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

young  men  of  great  strength,  given  to  appalling  fits 
of  nervous  breakdown)  had  it  not  been  that,  like 
Shakespeare,  who  was  probably  as  restless  as  he  was, 
and  unlike  Milton,  who  most  decidedly  was  not,  he  had 
the  saving  grace  of  a  sense  of  humour  ;  I  say  "  saving  " 
advisedly,  for  I  believe  that  humour  is  the  only  antidote 
known  to  this  form  of  mental  depression. 

In  the  hills  north-west  of  Ottawa,  he  wrote,  there 
grows  a  romantic  light  purple-red  flower  which  is 
called  fireweed,  because  it  is  the  first  vegetation  to 
spring  up  in  the  prairie  after  a  fire  has  passed  over,  and 
so  might  be  adopted  as  the  emblematic  flower  of  a  sense 
of  humour.  A  parable — a  piece  of  pure  autobiography. 
Ever  and  always  you  will  see  in  Brooke's  poems  how 
fascinating,  how  explanatory,  how  wistful  and  faithful 
a  follower  is  this  will-o'-the-wisp,  humour.  It  brings 
him  back  with  a  jerk  from  the  inane  pursuit  of  the 
abstract  ("there's  little  comfort  in  the  wise")  to  the 
direct  simplicity  of  actualities. 

Think  how  Gray  or  Collins  would  have  treated  this 
threnody  on  The  Funeral  of  Youth  : 

Folly  went  first, 

With  muffled  bells  and  coxcomb  still  revers'd ; 

And  after  trod  the  bearers,  hat  in  hand — 

Laughter,  most  hoarse,  and  Captain  Pride  with  tanned 

And  martial  face  all  grim,  and  fussy  Joy, 

Who  had  to  catch  a  train,  and  Lust,  poor,  snivelling  boy  ;  .  .  . 

The  fatherless  children,  Colour,  Tune,  and  Rhyme, 

(The  sweet  lad  Rhyme)  ran  all-uncomprehending.  .   .   . 

Beauty  was  there, 

Pale  in  her  black  ;  dry-eyed  ;  she  stood  alone.   .  .   . 

Contentment,  who  had  known  Youth  as  a  child 

And  never  seen  him  since.  .   .   . 

All,  except  only  Love.     Love  had  died  long  ago. 

Webster  is  here  in  the  line  on  Beauty  ;  Donne  too, 
the  Donne  of  the  general  reader,  the  Donne  known  of 


RUPERT  BROOKE  267 

all,  the  Donne  of  "  a  bracelet  of  bright  hair  about  the 

°This  poem  really  marks  a  sharp  cleavage  in  Brooke's 
work  It  appears  probable  that  two  schools,  widely 
divergent,  are  likely  to  rise  in  the  future:  those  who 
pin  their  faith  to  the  later  Brooke  and  look  on  all  his 
early  work  as  so  much  youthful  excrescence,  a  sort  ot 
impurity  which  had  to  be  sweated  out  before  the  poet 
could  express  the  greatness  which  he  undoubtedly  had 
in  him  but  which  perforce  lay  dormant,  weighted  under 
this  savage,  satiric  bent  of  his;  and  those  who  look 
on  his  early  work  as  the  final  expression  of  his  genius, 
who  reoard  the  last  poems  as  a  sad  falling  away  into 
a  distorted  romanticism  consequent  upon  untoward 
circumstances. 

It  all  depends  upon  what  exactly  you  expect  to  get 
out  of  poetry.  Most  of  us  would  agree  that  our  object 
in  reading  it  is  to  ascertain  what  the  seer  has  to  say 
about  the  vastlv  important  matters  of  Death,  Beauty 
and  Love;  if  Rupert  Brooke  had  nothing  strikingly 
sincere  to  say  about  these  things  he  would  have  no 
claim,  however  brilliant  his  brain-power  might  be, 
upon  our  attention  as  a  great  poet. 

As  it  happens,  however,   he  has  something  poig- 
nant,   refreshing    and    inspiring   to  say   on  all  these 

*  Inthis  part  of  his  work  he  reminds  me  of  three  other 
geniuses  in  English  literature.  He  has  the  same 
passionate  sense  of  rhythm  and  beauty  that  Marlowe 
had,  the  same  tendency  to  extravagant  hyperbole,  as 
can  be  seen  at  once  in  a  poem  like  Mummia  : 

Helen's  the  hair  shuts  out  from  me 

Verona's  livid  skies ; 
Gypsv  the  lips  I  press  ;  and  see 

Two  Antonys  in  your  eyes, 


268  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

the  same  unlawful  desires  to  pry  into  the  hidden 
recesses  even  at  the  risk  of  losing  his  own  soul :  the 
same  love  of  words  for  words'  sake  only. 

It  is  not  because  of  the  fortuitous  accident  of  dying 
young  and  in  Greece,  nor  because  he  was  inordinately 
fond  of  swimming  in  the  dark,  that  he  reminds  me  of 
Byron  ;  he  was  possessed  by  the  same  exuberant  and 
defiantly  adventurous  spirit,  the  same  protesting  passion 
of  revolt,  and  the  same  delight  in  real  existence : 

I  shall  desire  and  I  shall  find 

The  best  of  my  desires  ; 
The  autumn  road,  the  mellow  wind 

That  soothes  the  darkening  shires. 

And  laughter,  and  inn-fires. 

His  claim  to  be  called  the  Shelley  of  our  day 
is  less  obvious  ;  there  is  no  doubt,  however,  that  he 
had  in  him  much  of  that  clear,  ethereal  vision  that 
so  endears  Shelley  to  us,  much  of  that  intellectual 
hypersensitiveness  peculiar  to  Shelley  which  acts  as 
so  strong  and  biting  an  antidote  to  sentimentalism 
in  thought  and  melodious  facility  in  writing  ;  there 
are,  moreover,  times  when  we  feel  that  had  Rupert 
Brooke  lived  he  could  have  left  just  such  another  poem 
as  The  Cenci.  But  the  Shelley  an  influence  is  most 
noticeable  in  two  sonnets  dealing  with  the  Beyond  : 

Not  with  vain  tears,  when  we're  beyond  the  sun, 
We'll  beat  on  the  substantial  doors,  nor  tread 
Those  dusty  high-roads  of  the  aimless  dead 
Plaintive  for  Earth  ;  but  rather  turn  and  run 
Down  some  close-covered  by-way  of  the  air, 
Some  low  sweet  alley  between  wind  and  wind, 
Stoop  under  faint  gleams,  thread  the  shadows,  find 
Some  whispering  ghost-forgotten  nook,  and  there 
Spend  in  pure  converse  our  eternal  day ;  .   .   . 


RUPERT  BROOKE  269 

In  another  sonnet  he  compares  the  dead  to  clouds  : 

I  think  they  ride  the  calm  mid-heaven,  as  these, 

In  wise  majestic  melancholy  train, 
And  watch  the  moon,  and  the  still  raging  seas, 

And  men,  coming  and  going  on  the  earth. 

When  the  war  broke  out  he  began  naturally  to  write 
more  and  more  about  Death ;  he  felt  certain  that  he 
was  not  to  be  permitted  to  return  alive,  and  he  has  left 
behind  a  series  of  sonnets  which  threaten  to  become  his 
best-known  work,  so  often  have  they  been  quoted  of  late  : 

War  knows  no  power.     Safe  shall  be  my  going, 
Secretly  armed  against  all  death's  endeavour : 
Safe  though  all  safety's  lost;  safe  where  men  fall  ; 
And  if  these  poor  limbs  die,  safest  of  all. 

Even  here  he  has  not  forgotten  his  master ;  the 
sonnet  is  almost  a  direct  plagiarism  from  Donne : 

Who  is  so  safe  as  we  ? 

In  another  he  begins  characteristically  : 

Now,  God  be  thanked  Who  has  matched  us  with  His  hour, 
To  turn  .  .  .  glad  from  a  world  grown  old  and  cold  and  weary, 
Leave  the  sick  hearts  that  honour  could  not  move, 
And  half-men,  and  their  dirty  songs  and  dreary, 
And  all  the  little  emptiness  of  love. 

You  see  what  a  hold  this  early  hatred  of  false  love 
keeps  on  a  man  of  fastidious  delicacy  like  Brooke. 
There  is  a  touch  reminiscent  of  Shelley's  iC  love's  sad 
satiety  "  in  the  comparison  of  love's  emptiness  with  the 
dirty,  dreary  songs  of  half -men. 

But  by  far  his  most  famous  war  sonnet  is  The  Soldier, 
which  recalls  exactly  Masefield's  verse  about  those  who 

Died  (uncouthly,  most)  in  foreign  lands 

For  some  idea,  but  dimly  understood, 

Of  an  English  city  never  built  by  hands, 

Which  love  of  England  prompted  and  made  good. 


270  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

If  I  should  die,  think  only  this  of  me  : 
That  there's  some  corner  of  a  foreign  field 
That  is  for  ever  England.     There  shall  be 
In  that  rich  earth  a  richer  dust  concealed ; 
A  dust  whom  England  bore,  shaped,  made  aware, 
Gave,  once,  her  flowers  to  love,  her  ways  to  roam, 
A  body  of  England's,  breathing  English  air, 
Washed  by  the  rivers,  blest  by  suns  of  home.  .  .  . 

It  has  been  said  that  in  this  poem  he  fell  a  victim 
to  that  very  romanticism  which  he  so  detested  ;  a 
notable  successor  of  Donne's  at  St  Paul's  has  com- 
mented adversely  on  the  "  materialism "  underlying 
the  thought ;  it  has  also  been  described  as  infinitely 
the  most  inspired  poem  written  since  August,  1914. 
I  do  not  know  ;  we  are,  perhaps,  a  little  too  near  the 
big  event  to  be  able  to  judge  calmly  or  rationally  of 
the  lasting  power  of  war  poetry.  What  there 
can  be  no  possible  doubt  about  is  the  beauty  of  the 
conception  and  the  perfection  of  the  execution.  The 
very  repetition  of  the  word  "  England  "  here  is  like 
the  repetition  of  a  majestic  chord  in  a  peculiarly  fine 
piece  of  music.  It  should  be  noted,  however,  that  his 
love  of  country  found  expression  in  Grantckester  as  long 
ago  as  1912,  and  at  the  very  beginning  of  the  war  he 
wrote  in  a  prose  essay  in  The  New  Statesman  : 

The  word  "  England"  seems  to  flash  like  a  line  of  foam. 

But  for  myself  I  must  confess  that  I  prefer  The 
Treasure,  which  is  comparatively  unknown,  to  any  of 
the  five  sonnets  : 

When  colour  goes  home  into  the  eyes, 

And  lights  that  shine  are  shut  again 

With  dancing  girls  and  sweet  birds'  cries 

Behind  the  gateways  of  the  brain  ; 

And  that  no-place  which  gave  them  birth,  shall  close 

The  rainbow  and  the  rose  : — 


RUPERT  BROOKE  271 

Musing  upon  them ;  as  a  mother,  who 

Has  watched  her  children  all  the  rich  day  through, 

Sits,  quiet-handed,  in  the  fading  light, 

When  children  sleep,  ere  night. 

This  poem  is  all  the  more  precious  when  we  compare 
it  with  his  no  less  beautiful  but  more  juvenile  descrip- 
tion of  the  orthodox  heaven  : 

All  the  great  courts  were  quiet  in  the  sun, 
And  full  of  vacant  echoes  :  moss  had  grown 
Over  the  glassy  pavement,  and  begun 
To  creep  within  the  dusty  council-halls. 
An  idle  wind  blew  round  an  empty  throne 
And  stirred  the  heavy  curtains  on  the  walls. 

Or  contrast  it  with  that  restrained,  agonising  cry  (so 
like  T.  E.  Brown's  Dora)  in  The  Vision  of  the  Arch- 
angels : 

(Yet,  you  had  fancied,  God  could  never 
Have  bidden  a  child  turn  from  the  spring  and  the  sunlight, 
And  shut  him  in  that  lonely  shell,  to  drop  for  ever 
Into  the  emptiness  and  silence,  into  the  night).   .  .   . 
God's  little  pitiful  Body  lying,  worn  and  thin, 
And  curled  up  like  some  crumpled,  lonely  flower-petal.  .   .  . 

He  seems  to  have  cast  off  that  preciosity  so  dear 
to  the  heart  of  the  intellectual  young  graduate,  that 
hard  brilliance  which  almost  becomes  synonymous  with 
soullessness ;  his  beauty  becomes  deeper  and  more 
mellow  with  advancing  years  ;  the  outspokenly  sensual 
and  cruelly  cynical  stage  with  him,  as  with  Domie, 
was  not  lasting  ;  it  just  marked  the  stage  of  transition 
from  scintillating  coruscations  of  wit  to  the  tranquil 
heights  of  recollected  emotions  made  trebly  more  tender 
by  the  calm  peacefulness  that  permeates  them ;  now 
indeed  does  he  feed  on  thoughts  that  voluntarily  move 
harmonious  numbers. 


272  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

You  see  it  in  The  Charm  : 

You,  asleep, 
In  some  cool  room  that's  open  to  the  night 
Lying  half-forward,  breathing  quietly, 
One  white  hand  on  the  white 
Unrumpled  sheet,  and  the  ever-moving  hair 
Quiet  and  still  at  length. 

You  see  it  in  Day  that  I  have  Loved  : 

From  the  inland  meadows, 
Fragrant  of  June  and  clover,  floats  the  dark,  and  fills 
The  hollow  sea's  dead  face  with  little  creeping  shadows, 
And  the  white  silence  brims  the  hollow  of  the  hills. 

But  you  see  it  most  of  all  in  Grantchester,  the  one 
poem  by  which  the  poet  was  generally  known  before 
the  war : 

Just  now  the  lilac  is  in  bloom, 

All  before  my  little  room  ; 

And  in  my  flower-beds,  1  think, 

Smile  the  carnation  and  the  pink  ; 

And  down  the  borders,  well  I  know, 

The  poppy  and  the  pansy  blow.   .  .   . 

Oh  !  there  the  chestnuts,  summer  through 

Beside  the  river  make  for  you 

A  tunnel  of  green  gloom,  and  sleep 

Deeply  above  ;  and  green  and  deep 

The  stream  mysterious  glides  beneath,  .  .  . 

Du  lieber  Got!  ! 
Here  am  I,  sweating,  sick,  and  hot, 
And  there  the  shadowed  waters  fresh 
Lean  up  to  embrace  the  naked  flesh.  .   .  . 
eWe  yevoLjx-qv  .   .    .   would  I  were 
In  Grantchester,  in  Grantchester  ! —  ... 
Oh,  is  the  water  sweet  and  cool, 
Gentle  and  brown,  above  the  pool  ? 
And  laughs  the  immortal  river  still 
Under  the  mill,  under  the  mill  ? 
Say,  is  there  Beauty  yet  to  find  ? 
And  Certainty  ?  and  Quiet  kind  ?  .  .  . 


RUPERT  BROOKE  273 

This  exquisite  cameo,  this  perfect  setting  of  an 
English  landscape,  this  final  expression  of  a  passionate 
local  patriotism,  is  one  of  those  poems  the  fate  of  which 
is  absolutely  sure.  It  enters  into  that  select  list  which 
contains  V Allegro,  Fancy,  Corinna  and  Friar  Bacon 
and  Friar  Bungay.  Here  is  the  seeing  eye,  the  in- 
evitable word,  the  god  speaking  through  the  lips  of 
man  ;  it  is  true  magic,  gossamer-like,  almost  unbeliev- 
ably beautiful.  It  makes  one  get  a  faint  glimmering 
of  what  that  critic  meant  who  said  that  had  it  not  been 
for  Keats  we  should  have  had  no  Brooke.  If  the 
process  of  pruning  on  which  I  touched  at  the  beginning 
of  this  paper  enables  a  man  to  rebuild  his  conceptions 
of  beauty  as  effectively  as  this,  from  henceforward  I 
belong  to  the  iconoclasts. 

I  come  now  to  my  final  stage,  the  discussion  of 
Brooke's  attitude  to  Love. 

It  is  by  no  mere  coincidence  that  Browning  was  the 
greatest  love  poet  England  has  ever  had  ;  that  Browning 
was  merely  the  Victorian  edition  of  Domie ;  that 
Brooke  is  the  Georgian  reincarnation  of  the  same  man  ; 
there  is  no  fallacy  in  these  premises.  Doctor  Johnson 
would  not  have  been  alone  in  stigmatising  these  lines  : 

I'll  write  upon  the  shrinking  skies 
The  scarlet  splendour  of  your  name 

as  %i  extravagantly  hyperbolical,"  but  that  does  not 
prove  that  they  are  not  true.  There  can  be  no 
hyperbole  in  real  love.  These  lines  are  no  more 
than  the  naked  truth  to  a  man  of  Rupert  Brooke's 
temperament.  Just  as  he  only  discovered  real  beauty 
by  smashing  up  the  seemingly  beautiful,  so  he  found 
real  love  only  after  many  ghastly  experiments  with 
the  false. 


274  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

I  said  I  splendidly  loved  you ;  it's  not  true. 
Such  long  swift  tides  stir  not  a  land-locked  sea. 
On  gods  or  fools  the  high  risk  falls — on  you — 
The  clean  clear  bitter-sweet  that's  not  for  me. 
But — there  are  wanderers  in  the  middle  mist, 
Who  cry  for  shadows,  clutch,  and  cannot  tell 
Whether  they  love  at  all.  .  .  . 

They  doubt,  and  sigh, 
And  do  not  love  at  all.     Of  these  am  I. 

How  absolutely  Donne-like  is  this  almost  too  clever 
twist  in  the  tail.  You  see  it  again  in  this  favourite 
selection  of  two  such  different  critics  as  Gilbert  Murray 
and  Charles  Whibley  : 

Breathless,  we  flung  us  on  the  windy  hill, 
Laughed  in  the  sun,  and  kissed  the  lovely  grass. 
You  said,  "Through  glory  and  ecstasy  we  pass; 
Wind,  sun,  and  earth  remain,  the  birds  sing  still, 
When  we  are  old,  are  old.   .   .  ." 

Life  is  our  cry.     "  We  have  kept  the  faith  !  "  we  said  ; 
"  We  shall  go  down  with  unreluctant  tread 
Rose-crowned    into    the    darkness ! "  .  .   .   Proud   we 

were, 
And  laughed,  that  had  such  brave  true  things  to  say. 
—  And  then  you  suddenly  cried,  and  turned  away. 

In  Mummia,  another  love  poem  which  would  have 
caused  Doctor  Johnson  qualms,  he  says  : 

So  I,  from  paint,  stone,  tale,  and  rhyme, 

Stuffed  love's  infinity, 
And  sucked  all  lovers  of  all  time 

To  rarefy  ecstasy, 

and  goes  on  to  pray  that  his  love  may  be  the  quint- 
essence of  all  the  great  lovers  of  distant  ages  : 

For  the  uttermost  years  have  cried  and  clung 
To  kiss  your  mouth  to  mine. 


RUPERT  BROOKE  275 

At  another  time  he  imagines  himself  to  be  a  paralytic 
in  love — Brooke,  of  all  people  ! 

— And  you 
Flower-laden,  come  to  the  clean  white  cell, 
And  we  talk  as  ever — am  I  not  the  same  ? 
With  our  hearts  we  love,  immutable, 
You  without  pity,  I  without  shame. 

But  the  most  pregnant  of  all  these  is  The  Voice,  where 
the  lover  goes  out  into  the  woods  : 

And  I  knew 
That  this  was  the  hour  of  knowing, 
And  the  night  and  the  woods  and  you 
Were  one  together,  and  I  should  find 
Soon  in  the  silence  the  hidden  key 
Of  all  that  had  hurt  and  puzzled  me — 
Why  you  were  you,  and  the  night  was  kind, 
And  the  woods  were  part  of  the  heart  of  me. 

You  came  and  quacked  beside  me  in  the  wood. 
You  said,  "The  view  from  here  is  very  good !  " 
You  said,  "  It' s  nice  to  be  alone  a  bit !  " 
And,  "How  the  days  are  drawing  out ! "  you  said. 
You  said,  "The  sunset's  pretty,  isn't  it?" 

By  God  !     I  wish— I  wish  that  you  were  dead ! 

I  know  of  nothing  quite  so  stirring  as  this  in  his 
many  poems  where  he  harps  on  the  insatiable  wants  of 
man,  who  knows  not  what  he  wants  but  cries  with 
crooked  mouth  for  heaven,  only  to  throw  it  by.  But 
love  of  women  was  not  Rupert  Brooke's  greatest  love  : 

I  have  been  so  great  a  lover :  filled  my  days 
So  proudly  with  the  splendour  of  Love's  praise, 
The  pain,  the  calm,  and  the  astonishment, 
Desire  illimitable,  and  still  content.   .   .   . 

You  tremble  here,  as  one  critic  has  said,  on  the  verge 


276  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

of  the  hectic  nineties ;    you  imagine  that  he  is  about 
to  describe  his  Cyneras  and  Jennys.     Not  so. 

These  have  I  loved  : 
White  plates  and  cups,  clean-gleaming, 
Ringed  with  blue  lines ;  and  feathery,  faery  dust ; 
Wet  roofs,  beneath  the  lamp-light ;  the  strong  crust 
Of  friendly  bread  ;  and  many-tasting  food  ; 
Rainbows  ;  and  the  blue  bitter  smoke  of  wood  ; 
And  radiant  raindrops  couching  in  cool  flowers  ; 

O  dear  my  loves,  O  faithless,  once  again 

This  one  last  gift  I  give ;  that  after  men 

Shall  know,  and  later  lovers,  far-removed, 

Praise  you,  "All  these  were  lovely  "  ;  say,  "He  loved." 

Walt  Whitman  himself  never  exulted  in  so  sustained 
an  anthem  ;  it  is  the  benedicite  of  all  lovers  of  Nature. 
How  instantly  and  surely  does  Brooke  show  us  the 
captivation  of  the  sudden  flowering  miracle  of  the 
ordinary. 

We,  too,  go  out  after  reading  this,  and  for  a  moment 
gaze  spellbound  in  ecstasy  with  new  eyes  at  the  beauty 
of  boys  bathing  in  a  pool,  of  the  lighted  cottage  window 
at  dusk,  the  dim  religious  light  of  an  abbey  crowned 
by  the  crescent  moon ;  we,  too,  have  our  immortal 
moment  in  lilac  and  laburnum  time,  when  we  picture 
some  old  song's  lady,  a  snatch  of  a  forgotten  tune,  the 
echoing  laughter  of  our  best  beloved  who  may  be  far 
away  or  dead  ;  we,  too,  stand  on  the  heights  unpinioned 
and  gaze  out  over  the  empurpled  hills,  razor-like  in  their 
majestic  nakedness,  and  for  a  million  years  enraptured, 
god-like,  appreciative ;  we,  too,  can  sec  visions  of 
Arthur  setting  out  for  that  distant  vale  of  Avilion, 
where  falls  not  hail,  or  rain,  or  any  snow,  nor  ever  wind 
blows  loudly  ;  we,  too,  can  hear  the  voice  of  many 
waters,  of  the  breeze,  of  the  lark ;  the  scent  of  sweet- 
brier  and  of  peach  has  the  power  to  drive  even  us  almost 


RUPERT  BROOKE  277 

mad  with  infinite  longings  .  .  .  but  for  the  most  part 
we  are  content  to  crawl  homewards  with  downcast  eye, 
oblivious  of  beauty,  forgetful  of  love  ;  it  is  in  these  arid, 
never-ending,  viewless  deserts  that  we  need  most  of  all 
the  poets,  our  souls'  tin-openers,  that  we  may  open  our 
eyes  to  see,  our  ears  to  hear  ;  to  see  in  the  long  melan- 
cholic train  of  clouds  our  dead  friends  hovering,  to  hear 
in  the  joyous  trilling  of  birds  our  loved  ones'  happy 
laughter.  We,  too,  need  to  have  something  of  that 
magnificent  unpreparedness  for  the  long  littleness  of 
life  which  is  only  to  be  learnt  of  poets.  Rupert  Brooke, 
perhaps  more  than  any  poet  of  our  era,  is  able  to  teach 
us  something  of  the  things  that  matter.  It  was  not 
for  nothing  that  Ben  Jonson  styled  Donne  the  first 
poet  in  the  world  for  some  things.  So  is  his  disciple, 
Brooke.  If  you  require  a  corrective  for  lazy  thinking 
and  facile  writing,  turn  to  Donne  or  Brooke ;  if  that 
kind  of  wit  which  is  one  long  succession  of  disconcerting 
surprises  refreshes  you  and  inspires  you,  you  will  find 
it  in  each  of  these ;  if  you  are  willing  or  able  to  let 
beauty  come  to  you  as  it  comes  to  the  Alchemist  who 
• '  Glorifies  his  pregnant  pot,  If  by  the  way  to  him  befall, 
Some  odoriferous  thing  or  medicinal,"  you  will  be  helped 
again  by  reading  these  two  men,  you  will  forgive  the 
frequently  bizarre,  the  sometimes  even  repellent  tone 
that  creeps  in  almost  unconsciously,  because  of  that 
rare  intensity  of  feeling  which  pervades  their  whole 
outlook  on  life.  If  you  love  Browning,  but  are  too 
troubled  to  acquiesce  without  question  in  his  too 
comfortable  "  God's  in  His  Heaven — All's  right  with 
the  World,"  or  his  non-proven  optimism  about  reunion, 
"  I  shall  clasp  thee  again,  O  thou  soul  of  my  soul,  and 
with  God  be  the  rest,"  turn  to  Brooke  and  you  will  find 
the  same  erudition,  the  same  packed  intricacies,  the 
same  multitudinous  beauties  and  whimsical  phraseology, 


278  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

but  none  of  his  annoying  sophistry.  There  is  always 
latent  that  surest  of  all  foundations,  a  perfect  blend 
of  reason  and  imagination,  each  restraining  the  other 
so  that  reason  does  not  become  unsympathetic  hard- 
ness nor  imagination  degenerate  into  what  Words- 
worth so  well  called  mere  fancy. 

If  your  criterion  of  a  poet  be  that  he  should  possess 
fire,  a  joy  in  life,  a  classical  taste,  an  Hellenic  eye  for 
beauty  and  grace,  a  sense  of  the  lovely,  and  be  able  to 
differentiate  that  best  of  all  things,  Love,  from  that 
worst  travesty,  Sentimentalism,  you  will  be  among 
those  who  will  turn  for  solace  and  true  enjoyment  to 
Rupert  Brooke. 

There  has  passed  away  through  his  death  a  glory 
from  the  earth  ;  each  of  us  is  the  poorer  by  the  loss  of 
a  man  whom  all  his  friends  idolised  and  his  readers 
revered.  He  died  as  he  had  lived  ;  as  England  had 
lavished  on  him  all  the  gifts  in  superabundance  that 
mortal  man  can  desire,  so  he  was  willing  to  renounce 
them  as  a  sacrifice  on  the  altar  of  honour.  "  Proud 
then,  clear-eyed  and  laughing,  go  to  greet  Death  as  a 
friend."     Of  him  it  can  truly  be  said  as  of  few  others  : 

Nothing  is  here  for  tears,  nothing  to  wail 
Or  knock  the  breast ;  no  weakness,  no  contempt, 
Dispraise  or  blame  ;  nothing  but  well  and  fair, 
And  what  may  quiet  us  in  a  death  so  noble. 

A  young  Apollo,  golden-haired, 

Stands  dreaming  on  the  verge  of  strife, 

Magnificently  unprepared 

For  the  long  littleness  of  life. 


XI 
THE   POETRY   OF   THOMAS    HARDY 

WE  have  always  regarded  the  Golden  Treasury 
Series  as  a  garner-house  in  which  was  stored 
all  the  choicest  flowers  from  the  classics. 
Messrs  Macmillan  have  now  extended  their  scope  to 
include  (for  the  first  time)  selections  from  the  work 
of  a  genius  still,  happily,  alive,  and  it  is  a  compliment 
to  a  great  poet  that  his  work  should  be  considered 
worthy  to  find  a  place  in  this  august  library,  and  also  a 
tribute  to  the  critical  powers  of  the  publishers  that  they 
should  have  chosen  so  rare  and  precious  an  artist  as 
Thomas  Hardy  with  whom  to  inaugurate  their  departure 
from  their  original  scheme.  For  it  may  be  confidently 
stated  that  for  every  hundred  of  his  readers  as  a  novelist 
he  has  but  one  as  a  poet.  Even  the  most  cultured 
among  us  would  think  twice  before  daring  to  assert 
that  Thomas  Hardy,  the  greatest  living  writer  of  fiction, 
(which  few  would  dispute)  was  also  among  the  first 
three  poets  of  his  age. 

It  is  curious  how  many  novelists  are  also  poets.  It 
would  be  hard  to  recall  many  instances  of  famous 
poets  who  were  also  novelists,  but  there  are  numerous 
cases  of  the  converse  of  this.  Compton  Mackenzie 
will  certainly  outlive  his  generation  as  an  artist  in 
prose,  but  he  is  secondarily  by  no  means  to  be  despised 
as  a  poet.  D.  H.  Lawrence,  who  made  his  name  as  a 
novelist,  has  yet  written  much  poetry  which  would  be 
included  in  any  anthology  of  contemporary  poetry. 
St  John  Lucas,  who  has  earned  our  lasting  gratitude  in 
The  First  Round  and  April  Folly,  is  also  a  poet  of  no 
279 


280  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

inconsiderable  merit.  Ivy  Low  .  .  .  but  there  are  far 
more  famous  instances  than  these ;  Robert  Louis 
Stevenson  and  George  Meredith,  George  Eliot  and 
the  Brontes,  Kipling  and  Goldsmith,  Scott — the  list 
is  unending.  The  difficulty  is  to  find  an  exception, 
whereas  it  is  hard  to  imagine  those  who  are  primarily 
poets  writing  novels  at  all.  What  sort  of  a  novel 
should  we  expect  from  Wordsworth,  Keats,  Shelley, 
Rupert  Brooke,  Swinburne,  Tennyson,  Browning, 
Robert  Bridges,  Yeats,  Noyes,  Walter  de  la  Mare, 
Drinkwater  or  Flecker  ? 

Naturally  we  read  with  unqualified  delight  and 
interest  all  that  our  favourite  novelists  put  into  poetry, 
for  we  there  find  their  philosophy  crystallised,  we  find 
more  of  themselves,  for,  broadly  speaking,  the  average 
novel  is  objective  and  dramatic  whereas  poetry  is 
subjective  and  reflective.  We  get  a  far  closer  insight 
into  the  workings  of  our  novelist's  mind  if  he  writes 
poetry,  for  there  at  least  we  can  be  certain  of  finding 
the  man  himself.  So  just  as  all  true  lovers  of  Meredith 
read  his  poetry  with  no  less  avidity  than  his  novels, 
so  all  disciples  of  Hardy  will  be  grateful  for  this 
exceedingly  well-chosen  collection  of  his  poems  now 
published. 

The  book,  which  is  all  too  slim,  and  contains  less  than 
one  hundred  and  fifty  short  poems,  is  divided  into  three 
parts — Lyrical,  Narrative  and  Martial — written  in  every 
conceivable  sort  of  metre.  For  Hardy  is  nothing  if  not 
experimental ;  he  ranges  from  the  severely  classical 
Sapphic  to  the  most  formless  of  modern  metric  devices  ; 
he  achieves  beauty  in  nearly  every  case,  but  he  is 
obviously  never  satisfied  that  he  has  found  the  best 
mould  in  which  to  cast  his  thoughts ;  he  repeats 
himself  less  than  any  contemporary  poet,  whether  in 
language  or  form.     On  the  other  hand  his  philosophy, 


THOMAS  HARDY  281 

the  essence  of  his  work,  is  stable  and  uniform  ;  the 
fatalism  which  we  have  come  to  regard  as  his  most 
pronounced  characteristic  is  softened  to  a  considerable 
extent.  We  could  no  longer  imagine  Mr  G.  K. 
Chesterton,  for  instance,  comparing  him  in  this  instance 
with  "  the  village  atheist  blaspheming  over  the  village 
idiot." 

Browning,  to  take  a  typical  example,  might  well  have 
written  On  the  Departure  Platform,,  with  its  theory  of 
the  transitory  nature  of  human  happiness. 

And  why,  young  man,  must  eternally  fly 
A  joy  you'll  repeat,  if  you  love  her  well  ? 

— O  friend,  nought  happens  twice  thus ;  why, 
I  cannot  tell ! 

and  Browning  above  all  men  was  dear  to  the  heart  of 
Chesterton.  It  is  a  mistake  to  suppose  that  Hardy 
has  not  experienced  his  ecstatic  moments  in  common 
with  the  most  thoughtless  of  us. 

A  Day  is  drawing  to  its  fall 

I  had  not  dreamed  to  see ; 
The  first  of  many  to  enthrall 

My  spirit,  will  it  be  ? 
Or  is  this  eve  the  end  of  all 

Such  new  delight  for  me  ? 

I  journey  home  :  the  pattern  grows 

Of  moon  shades  on  the  way  : 
"Soon  the  first  quarter,  I  suppose," 

Sky-glancing  travellers  say. 
I  realize  that  it,  for  those, 

Has  been  a  common  day. 

This  scarcely  fits  in  with  our  preconceived  theories 
about  the  pessimistic  ugliness  of  the  author  of  Tess. 

The  truth  is  rather  that  Hardy  is  of  all  living  poets 
the  most  sensitive  to  the  appeal  of  beauty  ;  out  of  the 


282  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

simplest  hack  phrases  of  conversation  he  seems  to 
evolve  a  magical  melody. 

Let  me  enjoy  the  earth  no  less 

Because  the  all-enacting  Might 
That  fashioned  forth  its  loveliness 

Had  other  aims  than  ray  delight  .  .   . 

is  a  brave  verse,  and  certainly  not  the  despairing  cry 
of  the  village  atheist  blaspheming.  "Life  offers — to 
deny,"  he  sings  in  YelV ham- Wood's  Story,  but  that  is 
merely  the  cry  of  a  heart  that  will  not  allow  reason  to 
be  overpowered  by  plausible  blind  emotion ;  he  refuses 
to  blink  the  fact  that  life  is  tragic,  poignant,  illogical 
and  uncomfortable. 

He  merely  wishes  to  put  on  record  his  experience  that, 
given  the  time  and  the  place  and  the  loved  one  all  to- 
gether, there  still  lurks  some  secret  thing  which  prevents 
man  from  seizing  the  golden  opportunity.  He  pictures 
in  At  an  Inn  two  lovers  left  alone  as  "  Love's  own  pair  " 
who  had  resigned  all  for  "  love's  dear  ends." 

The  kiss  their  zeal  foretold, 

And  now  deemed  come, 
Came  not ;  within  his  hold 

Love  lingered  numb. 
Why  cast  he  on  our  port 

A  bloom  not  ours  ? 
Why  shaped  us  for  his  sport 

In  after-hours  ? 

As  we  seemed  we  were  not 

That  day  afar, 
And  now  we  seem  not  what 

We  aching  are. 
O  severing  sea  and  land, 

O  laws  of  men, 
Ere  death,  once  let  us  stand 

As  we  stood  then  ! 


THOMAS  HARDY  283 

At  times  he  jerks  out  uncouth  words  at  us  with 
malicious  intent;  "  unsight,"  "  enray,"  "  enarch," 
"  unease  "  and  "  disennoble  "  all  occur  in  two  sequent 
stanzas,  but  when  he  employs  terms  like  these  we  feel 
somehow  that  he  does  so  for  some  hidden  jDurpose  of  his 
own,  not  from  slackness,  not  because  he  is  deaf  to 
their  sound,  not  because  there  were  no  other  more 
legitimate  and  pleasant-sounding  words  that  would 
do  instead,  but  because  by  them  alone  could  he  attain 
exactly  the  atmosphere  he  required  at  that  moment. 

His  most  intimately  personal,  beautiful  and  moving 
poems  are  those  written  on  his  wife's  death.  Here  we 
have  sheer  beauty  of  sentiment  allied  with  perfect, 
simple  expression : 

Why  did  you  give  no  hint  that  night 

That  quickly  after  the  morrow's  dawn, 
And  calmly,  as  if  indifferent  quite, 

You  would  close  your  term  here,  up  and  be  gone 
Where  I  could  not  follow 
With  wing  of  swallow 
To  gain  one  glimpse  of  you  ever  anon  ' 

Never  to  bid  good-bye, 

Or  give  me  the  softest  call, 
Or  utter  a  wish  for  a  word,  while  I 
Saw  morning  harden  upon  the  wall, 
Unmoved,  unknowing 
That  your  great  going 
Had  place  that  moment,  and  altered  all. 

Why  do  you  make  me  leave  the  house 

And  think  for  a  breath  it  is  you  I  see 
At  the  end  of  the  alley  of  bending  boughs 
Where  so  oft  at  dusk  you  used  to  be  : 
Till  in  darkening  darkness 
The  yawning  blankness 
Of  the  perspective  sickens  me  ! 

Even  more,  harping  on  the  same  strain,  that  of  his  wife's 
death,  in  Without  Ceremony,  do  we  see  how  he  gets  a 


284  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

supremely  exquisite  effect  with  the  common  phraseology 
of  every  day  transmuted  into  music  by  the  genius  of 
the  poet : 

It  was  your  way,  my  dear, 
To  be  gone  without  a  word 
When  callers,  friends,  or  kin 
Had  left,  and  I  hastened  in 
To  rejoin  you,  as  I  inferred. 

And  when  you'd  a  mind  to  career 
Off  anywhere — say  to  town — 
You  were  all  on  a  sudden  gone 
Before  I  had  thought  thereon, 
Or  noticed  your  trunks  were  down. 

So  now,  that  you  disappear 
For  ever  in  that  swift  style 
Your  meaning  seems  to  me 
Just  as  it  used  to  be  : 
"  Good-bye  is  not  worth  while  !  " 

It  is  worth  while  analysing  this  poem  in  detail,  if 
you  would  discover  Hardy's  mastery  over  the  common- 
place. Notice  the  intricate  rhyme  -  scheme,  the 
ordinariness  of  "  when  you'd  a  mind  to  career  off 
anywhere — say  to  town  "  ;  could  anything  be  more 
conversational,  more  like  the  speech  of  every  day  ? 
How  Wordsworth  would  have  delighted  in  this  con- 
summate proof  of  the  efficacy  of  his  theory  of  poetic 
diction :  it  requires  more  than  common  courage  to 
risk  such  bare  simplicity,  for  if  you  fail,  your  fall  is 
seen  at  once  by  even  the  dullest  critic ;  conversely, 
if  you  succeed,  as  there  is  no  doubt  Hardy  does  here, 
your  success  is  due  to  genius  alone,  unaided  by  any 
cloying  sweetness,  or  exotic,  fair-sounding  words  that 
lull  the  senses  and  put  all  one's  critical  faculties  to 
sleep. 


THOMAS  HARDY  285 

Could  anything  be  more  simple  than  his  two  superb 
poems  to  his  dead  wife,  At  Castle  Boterel  and  The 
Phantom  Horsewoman*! 

Queer  are  the  ways  of  a  man  I  know  : 

He  comes  and  stands 

In  a  careworn  craze, 

And  looks  at  the  sands 

And  the  seaward  haze 

With  moveless  hands 

And  face  and  gaze, 

Then  turns  to  go.   .   .  . 
And  what  does  he  see  when  he  gazes  so  ? 

They  say  he  sees  as  an  instant  thing 

More  clear  than  to-day, 

A  sweet  soft  scene 

That  once  was  in  play 

By  that  briny  green  : 

Yes,  notes  alway 

Warm,  real,  and  keen, 

What  his  back  years  bring — 
A  phantom  of  his  own  figuring. 

A  ghost  girl-rider.     And  though,  toil-tried, 

He  withers  daily, 

Time  touches  her  not, 

But  she  still  rides  gaily 

In  his  rapt  thought 

On  that  shagged  and  shaly 

Atlantic  spot, 

And  as  when  first  eyed 
Draws  rein  and  sings  to  the  swing  of  the  tide. 

It  will  surprise  many  of  those  people  who  for  years 
have  denounced  Hardy  for  his  miserable  lack  of  hope 
or  faith  to  find  that  he  comes  into  line  with  all  the 
youngest  soldier-poets  of  to-day,  who  sing  incessantly 
of  the  future  life  when  their  spirits  will  return  to  the 
places  they  had  learnt  to  love  best. 


286  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

My  spirit  will  not  haunt  the  mound 

Above  my  breast, 
But  travel,  memory-possessed, 
To  where  my  tremulous  being  found 

Life  largest,  best. 


This  scarcely  fits  in  with  the  accepted  ideas  about 
pessimism.  The  truth  is,  Hardy  was  as  capable  of 
experiencing  the  finest  passions  as  any  great  genius  is  ; 
life's  peerless  moments  of  bliss  had  come  his  way  too 
and  he  had  not  despised  them.  His  love  for  his  wife 
is  as  self-evident  as  Browning's  was  ;  only  the  inevit- 
able reaction  came.  "  Too  fragrant  was  Life's  early 
bloom,  Too  tart  the  fruit  it  brought."  Just  as  he 
was  capable  of  loving  much  so  was  he  condemned, 
as  all  great  lovers  are,  to  suffer  in  exactly  the  same 
proportion. 

Brush  not  the  bough  for  midnight  scents 

That  come  forth  lingeringly, 
And  wake  the  same  sweet  sentiments 

They  breathed  to  you  and  me 
When  living  seemed  a  laugh,  and  love 

All  it  was  said  to  be. 
I  did  not  know 
That  heydays  fade  and  go, 
But  deemed  that  what  was  would  be  always  so. 

Is  not  this  rather  the  awakening  of  the  optimist  to  a 
sense  of  this  world's  shortcomings  ? 

I  think  it  was  Chesterton  who  first  pointed  out  that 
the  pessimist  was  really  more  optimistic  than  the 
optimist  because  he  was  not  content  with  things  as 
they  are  but  saw  in  his  visions  a  much  finer  world  and 
spent  his  whole  life  in  trying  to  bring  it  into  being. 
In  To  an  Unborn  Pauper  Child  we  get  this  point  of 
view  exactly  : 


THOMAS  HARDY  287 

and  such  are  we — 
Unreasoning,  sanguine,  visionary — 
That  I  can  hope 
Health,  love,  friends,  scope 
In  full  for  thee ;  can  dream  thou'lt  find 
Joys  seldom  yet  attained  by  mankind. 

"  Unreasoning,  sanguine,  visionary "  are  not  the 
adjectives  we  should  normally  apply  to  Hardy,  but  no 
picture  of  him  can  claim  to  be  complete  which  harps 
only  on  his  fatalistic  side,  the  side  that  produced  that 
terrible  poem  on  The  Titanic. 

Well — while  was  fashioning 

This  creature  of  cleaving  wing, 
The  Immanent  Will  that  stirs  and  urges  everything 

Prepared  a  sinister  mate 

For  her — so  gaily  great — 
A  Shape  of  Ice,  for  the  time  far  and  dissociate. 

And  as  the  smart  ship  grew 

In  stature,  grace,  and  hue, 
In  shadowy  silent  distance  grew  the  Iceberg  too. 

Till  the  Spinner  of  the  Years 

Said  "  Now  !  "  and  each  one  hears, 
And  consummation  comes,  and  jars  two  hemispheres. 

There  shines  forth  the  intellect  that  refuses  to  be 
hoodwinked,  that  will  not  allow  itself  to  be  soothed 
with  vain,  false  words  of  comfort. 

How  perfectly  he  merges  that  clear,  critical  faculty 
into  the  musical  can  be  seen  at  once  in  his  tribute  to 
Swinburne  : 

— It  was  as  though  a  garland  of  red  roses 
Had  fallen  about  the  hood  of  some  smug  nun 
When  irresponsibly  dropped  as  from  the  sun, 
In  fulth  of  numbers  freaked  with  musical  closes 
Upon  Victoria's  formal  middle  time 

His  leaves  of  rhythm  and  rhyme. 

He  is  like  Wordsworth  in  this,  that  he  does  mean 
so  very  much  more  than  he  says.     There  is  a  whole 


288  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

parable  of  life  in  the  poem  on  the  tradition  of  the  oxen 
kneeling  on  Christmas  Eve. 

I  feel 
If  someone  said  on  Christmas  Eve, 
1 '  Come  ;  see  the  oxen  kneel 
In  the  lonely  barton  by  yonder  coomb 

Our  childhood  used  to  know," 
I  should  go  with  him  in  the  gloom, 
Hoping  it  might  be  so. 

How  Wordsworthian,  again,  is  The  Bear,  in  which 
he  describes  his  chance  meeting  on  the  hill-tops  with 
a  maiden,  "  one  fain  would  guard  from  every  hazard 
and  every  care  "  : 

I  wondered  how  succeeding  suns 

Would  shape  her  wayfarings, 
And  wished  such  Power  might  take  such  ones 

Under  its  warding  wings. 

He  then  greeted  her:  "Commiserate  still.  'Good 
morning,  my  Dear  ! '  I  said."  She  replied  that  she  was 
not  his  dear  and  passed  him  by  .  .  .  and  ...  "I 
did  not  try  to  make  her  understand." 

It  is  easy  enough  to  misread  such  a  poem  altogether 
and  dismiss  it  with  a  sneer,  but  it  is  a  mistake  into  which 
we  often  fall,  this  of  attributing  to  genius  intellects  not 
very  far  superior  to  our  own.  We  have  to  remember 
too,  that,  unlike  many  great  poets,  Hardy  has  a  very 
finely  developed  sense  of  humour  and  is  not  likely  to 
be  led  astray  into  writing  rubbish. 

Some  of  his  narrative  poems  have  as  their  theme 
the  most  commonplace  incidents,  which  yet  become 
pregnant  with  meaning  when  seen  through  the  eyes  of 
the  seer.  Few  who  have  read  Beyond  the  Last  Lamp : 
beyond  Tooting  Common  (of  all  unpoetic  places)  will 
easily  forget  the  impression  made  on  them  by  the  story 


THOMAS  HARDY  289 

of  the  miserable  couple  pacing  up  and  down  "  heedless 
of  the  night  and  rain." 

One  could  but  wonder  who  they  were 
And  what  wild  woe  detained  them  there. 

Thirty  years  after,  the  poet  still  sees  them  when 
nights  are  weird  and  wet  ...  it  is  this  interest  in  all 
the  world  about  him  that  makes  the  only  true  criterion 
by  which  we  can  judge  our  poet. 

The  Face  at  the  Casement  is  more  definitely  tragic. 

The  lover  passes  with  his  beloved  under  the  window 
of  the  dying  man,  who  had  also  loved  her,  but  in  vain. 

He  wished  to  marry  me, 
So  I  am  bound,  when  1  drive  near  him, 
To  enquire,  if  but  to  cheer  him, 
How  he  may  be. 

Her  message  is  sent  up  to  the  sick  man,  who  thanks 
her  extravagantly  for  coming,  and  they  drive  on. 
The  favoured  lover  then  designs  a  deed  of  hell :  know- 
ing his  rival  to  be  gazing  out  of  the  lattice  upon  their 
receding  figures,  he  puts  his  arm  about  her  that  he 
might  see,  nor  doubt  her  "my  plighted  Love."  The 
poem  then  ends  on  a  note  quite  foreign  to  our  old  idea 
of  Hardy : 

Love  is  long-suffering,  brave. 
Sweet,  prompt,  precious  as  a  jewel : 
But  O,  too,  Love  is  cruel, 
Cruel  as  the  grave. 

It  seems  hard  to  believe  that  he  would  concede  so 
much  to  love  as  to  allow  her  those  five  all-conquering 
attributes,  especially  when  we  remember  that  in  an 
earlier  poem  he  had  definitely  stated  that  it  would  be 
better  for  mankind  to  cease  without  love's  kindling 
coupling-vow  rather  than  to  learn  what  her  sway 
meant. 


290  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

A  third  narrative  poem,  longer  than  the  others, 
called  The  Burghers  (Casterbridge,  17 — ),  tells  of  a  man 
who  caught  his  wife  on  the  point  of  running  away  with 
a  man  ;  instead  of  killing  them,  as  his  friend  advises,  he 
heaps  on  her  all  his  possessions  and  sees  them  quietly 
off  the  grounds. 

It  was  my  friend.     "  1  have  struck  well.     They  fly, 

But  carry  wounds  that  none  can  cicatrize." 

"Not  mortal?"  said  he.     "  Lingering — worse/'  said  I. 

Once  only,  in  In  Tenebris,  does  he  lament  his  loneli- 
ness and  separation  from  mankind ;  once  only,  just  as 
Meredith  let  us  see  his  deep  agony  in  his  letters. 

The  poem  is  more  self- revelatory  than  anything  else 
Hardy  ever  wrote — it  is  wrung  out  of  him. 

He  begins  by  quoting  Psalm  141  :  "  Considerabam 
ad  dexteram,  et  videbam  ;  et  non  erat  qui  cognosceret 
me." 

When  the  clouds'  swoln  bosoms  echo  back  the  shouts  of  the 

many  and  strong, 
The  things  are  all  as  they  best  may  be,  save  a  few  to  be  right 

ere  long, 
And  my  eyes  have  not  the  vision  in  them  to  discern  what  to 

these  is  so  clear, 
The  blot  seems  straightway  in  me  alone  ;  one  better  he  were 

not  here. 
Let  him  in  whose  ears  the  low-voiced  Best  is  killed  by  the 

clash  of  the  First, 
Who  holds  that  if  way  to  the  Better  there  be,  it  exacts  a  full 

look  at  the  Worst, 
Who  feels  that   delight   is   a   delicate  growth   cramped   by 

crookedness,  custom,  and  fear, 
Get  him  up  and  be  gone  as  one  shaped  awry  :  he  disturbs 

the  order  here. 

So  we  get  our  Hardy  humanised  even  more  than  we 
thought ;    he  does  care,  he  does  suffer  horribly  under 


THOMAS  HARDY  291 

the  false  accusations  made  against  him.  It  is  the  lot 
of  the  seer,  the  prophet  and  the  teacher,  "to  disturb 
the  order  here  ' '  ;  the  whole  of  progress  lies  in  our 
poets'  capacity  for  making  us  readjust  our  values  and 
test  our  standards  anew  from  time  to  time ;  were  it  not 
for  the  many  severe  shakings  that  they  administer  we 
should  contentedly  settle  down,  apathetically  take 
things  as  they  come,  and  give  assent  to  that  immoral 
doctrine  that  all  is  for  the  best  in  this  best  of  all  possible 
worlds  ;  if  that  is  so  we  must  be  pessimists  indeed. 
Like  Alexander  we  might  be  forgiven  if  we  sat  down 
and  wept  as  there  are  no  more  worlds  to  conquer.  It  is 
the  optimist  who  forges  ahead,  feeling  that  delight  is  a 
delicate  growth,  cramped  by  crookedness,  custom,  and 
fear,  to  worlds  where  delight  may  be  jmre  and  unalloyed. 
But  after  all  In  Tenebris  is  only  a  mood ;  luckily  all 
poets  know  in  their  hearts  that  they  are  right  and  the 
world  is  wrong.  In  the  final  poem  of  Part  II.  of  this 
volume  we  see  him  once  more  his  true  self,  out  of  the 
depths,  serene. 

For  loud  acclaim  he  does  not  care 
By  the  august  or  rich  or  fair, 
Nor  for  smart  pilgrims  from  afar, 
Curious  on  where  his  hauntings  are, 

and  he  finishes  on  this  triumphant  note  of  thankfulness : 

Whatever  his  message — glad  or  grim — 
Two  bright-souled  women  clave  to  him. 

There  is  little  here  of  the  village  atheist  blaspheming 
over  the  village  idiot. 

The  last  part  of  the  book  is  given  up  to  war  poems 
and  lyrics  from  The  Dynasts. 

Here  again  he  refuses  to  blink  his  eyes  to  the  facts, 
and  just  because  he  is  clear-sighted  he  can  foresee  a  time 


292  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

when  patriotism,  grown  God-like,  will  scorn  to  stand 
bondslave  to  realms,  but  circle  earth  and  seas.  War 
is  so  amazingly  futile  and  purposeless. 

Yes  ;  quaint  and  curious  war  is  ! 

You  shoot  a  fellow  down 
You'd  treat  if  met  where  any  bar  is 

Or  help  to  half-a-crown. 

and  yet  .  .  .  and  yet  .  .  . 

Is  it  a  purblind  prank,  O  think  you. 

Friend  with  the  musing  eye, 

Who  watch  us  stepping  by 

With  doubt  and  dolorous  sigh  ? 
Can  much  pondering  so  hoodwink  you  ! 
Is  it  a  purblind  prank,  O  think  you, 

Friend  with  the  musing  eye  ? 

Nay.     We  well  see  what  we  are  doing, 

Though  some  may  not  see — 

Dalliers  as  they  be — 

England's  need  are  we  : 
Her  distress  would  leave  us  rueing, 
Nay.     We  well  see  what  we  are  doing, 

Though  some  may  not  see. 

This  is  a  good  note  on  which  to  leave  this  all  too 
slim  volume.  Hardy  himself  has  never  been  in  any 
doubt  as  to  his  aims — it  is  only  we  who  are  in  blinkers 
when  we  attribute  to  such  an  intellect  ' '  purblind 
pranks  "  or  the  inspissated  gloom  of  the  cursing  atheist. 

He  has  found  life  very  sweet,  and  as  a  quite  natural 
corollary  he  has  also  found  it  exceeding  bitter ;  he 
reveals  himself  in  all  his  moods  ;  at  one  moment  he 
turns  from  the  trees  to  human  companionship : 

Since,  then,  no  grace  I  find 

Taught  me  of  trees, 
Turn  I  back  to  my  kind, 

Worthy  as  these. 


THOMAS  HARDY  298 

There  at  least  smiles  abound, 

There  discourse  trills  around, 
There,  now  and  then,  are  found 

Life-loyalties. 

At  another  he  seeks  the  Wessex  Heights  to  escape 
from  the  ghosts  that  continually  haunt  him  in  the 
lowlands  : 

Mind-chains  do  not   clank  where    one's    next    neighbour   is 

the  sky. 
There  are  some  heights  in  Wessex,  shaped  as  if  by  a  kindly 

hand 
For  thinking,  dreaming,  dying  on,  and  at  crises  when  I  stand, 
Say,  on  Ingpen  Beacon  eastward,  or  on  Wylls  Neck  westwardly, 
I  seem  where  I  was  before  my  birth,  and  after  death  may  be. 
So  I  am  found  on  Ingpen  Beacon,  or  on  Wylls  Neck  to  the 

west. 
Or  else  on  homely  Bulbarrow,  or  little  Pilsdon  crest, 
Where  men  have    never  cared  to   haunt,  nor  women   have 

walked  with  me, 
And  ghosts   then   keep   their   distance :   and  I  know  some 

liberty. 

Curiously  enough,  Hardy's  superb  descriptions  of  the 
beauties  of  the  Dorset  which  he  has  made  all  his  own 
are  reserved  for  his  prose  epics ;  he  never  approaches 
the  majesty  of  the  opening  chapters  of  The  Return  of 
the  Native  in  any  of  his  descriptive  poems  ;  he  is  rarely 
in  his  poetry  merely  descriptive  at  all.  At  his  sweetest, 
he  uses  the  scenery,  say,  of  the  Cornish  coast  as  a  back- 
ground and  a  setting  for  his  wife's  portrait.  Not  that 
he  cannot  crystallise  in  the  most  exquisite  form  any 
mood  of  Nature  which  he  wants  to  pin  down,  more 
particularly,  of  course,  her  harsher  ones. 

I  leant  upon  a  coppice  gate 

When  Frost  was  spectre-grey, 
And  winter's  days  made  desolate 

The  weakening  eye  of  day. 


294  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

The  tangled  bine-stems  scored  the  sky 

Like  strings  of  broken  lyres, 
And  all  mankind  that  haunted  nigh 

Had  sought  their  household  fires. 
The  land's  sharp  features  seemed  to  be 

The  Century's  corpse  outleant, 
His  crypt  the  cloudy  canopy, 

The  wind  his  death-lament. 
The  ancient  pulse  of  germ  and  birth 

Was  shrunken  hard  and  dry, 
And  every  spirit  upon  earth 

Seemed  fervourless  as  I. 


His  wonderful  manipulation  of  diverse  metrical 
forms,  his  passionate  love  for  his  wife  and  his  never-to- 
be-forgotten  sense  of  loss  when  she  died,  beautifully 
expressed  in  imperishable  verse,  his  keen,  penetrating 
philosophy,  his  delight  in  the  mere  telling  of  a  story, 
all  combine  to  make  this  all  too  slim  body  of  work  of 
rare  and  lasting  value. 

His  sense  of  the  musical  was  evident  to  anyone  who 
studied  the  lyrics  in  The  Dynasts,  but  his  amazing 
successes  with  every  sort  of  metrical  and  rhythmical 
experiment  that  he  tried  are  not  so  commonly  recog- 
nised. The  point  most  to  be  kept  in  mind  is  that  he 
attains  that  success  with  the  ordinary,  everyday  speech 
of  us  all.  Here  is  none  of  the  dreamy,  sensuous 
language  of  Keats  or  Coleridge,  heavy  with  romance 
words  ;  his  is  the  vocabulary  of  the  satirist,  of  Swift, 
Anglo-Saxon,  monosyllabic,  intellectual,  bare  .  .  .  he 
has  followed  no  school  and  founded  none.  He  dis- 
dains to  employ  any  tricks  to  cajole  the  multitude  to 
listen  to  his  pipings  ;  consequently,  the  Caesar  to  whom 
he  appeals  for  judgment  is  posterity.  He  will  never 
create  a  furore  among  his  contemporaries  ;  he  has 
remained  isolated  and  aloof  all  these  years  and  may  be 
well  content  to  remain  so  for  the  remainder  of  his  life. 


THOMAS  HARDY  295 

He  already  has  to  suffer,  while  alive,  the  doom  of  being 
a  classic,  and  therefore  talked  about  and  not  read  by 
the  million,  in  his  novels.  He  has  to  endure  the  vitriolic 
abuse  of  the  orthodox,  who  see  in  his  intellectual 
straightness  and  hard-won  theories  of  life  only  the 
vapourings  of  a  village  atheist,  and  finally,  like  so  many 
other  great  poets,  he  has  failed  altogether  to  obtain 
recognition  for  his  purest  work  owing  to  the  blindness 
or  slackness  of  contemporary  criticism. 


XII 
O.  HENRY 

I  CANNOT  claim  to  be  among  that  select  band  who 
found  and  loved  O.  Henry's  short  stories  before 
the  present  boom  set  in.  I  owe  my  knowledge 
of  him  entirely  to  Stephen  Leacock's  eulogistic  essay, 
in  which  he  prophesies  that  the  time  is  coming  when 
the  whole  English-speaking  world  will  recognise  in 
O.  Henry  one  of  the  great  masters  of  modern  literature. 
I  read  him  to  refute  this  amazing  paean  ;  I  read  every 
word  he  published  ;  I  read  a  great  deal  of  him  aloud, 
and  I  may  say,  in  passing,  that  he  gains  infinitely  by 
being  read  aloud.  Now  comes  an  authentic  biography 
of  him  from  a  Professor  of  English  in  the  University  of 
Virginia,  who  says  that  in  O.  Henry  non- critical  readers 
find  a  range  of  fancy,  an  exuberance  of  humour,  a 
sympathy,  an  understanding,  a  knowledge  of  the  raw 
material  of  life,  an  ability  to  interpret  the  passing  in 
terms  of  the  permanent,  an  insight  into  individual  and 
institutional  character,  a  resolute  and  pervasive  desire 
to  help  those  in  need  of  help) — in  a  word,  a  constant  and 
essential  democracy  that  they  find  in  no  other  short- 
story  writer. 

I  fear  that  the  two  professors,  in  their  enthusiasm 
over  their  hero,  are  likely  to  overshoot  the  mark  and 
drive  away  many  timid  readers  who,  carefully  enticed, 
might  have  become  devotees  of  this  remarkable  writer  ; 
for  however  much  the  method  of  "  thrusting  down  the 
throat "  may  succeed  in  America,  it ;;  cuts  very  little  ice  " 
in  England. 

We  are  told  that  his  adherents  across  the  Atlantic 

296 


O.  HENRY  297 

can  be  counted  in  millions,  which  rather  tends  to  make 
the  cultured,  academic  mind  of  this  country  avoid  so 
successful  a  genius.  He  thinks  fretfully  of  those  writers 
who  count  as  best  sellers  in  the  British  Isles.  So  far 
from  being  a  point  in  their  favour,  such  evidence  only 
militates  against  them  here,  for  the  most  popular  writers 
are  rarely  the  masters  and  are  but  seldom  among  those 
who  have  any  new  message  to  deliver. 

Respecting,  however,  the  calm  verdict  of  so  obviously 
sane  a  critic  as  Professor  Leacock,  they  buy  one  volume 
of  O.  Henry's,  ready  to  find  fault,  and  within  a  few 
minutes  they  have  found  a  dozen  or  a  score  of  tactical 
errors  that  rankle. 

They  object  to  his  slap-dash  style,  his  far-fetched 
metaphors  and  similes  with  which  he  besprinkles  nearly 
every  sentence.  He  is  as  fond  of  a  ridiculous  illustra- 
tion as  Shakespeare  was  of  puns.  They  cavil  at  his 
impossible  exaggerations  as  palpable  and  false  as 
Falstaff' s  ;  his  wit,  which  degenerates  only  too  often 
into  buffoonery  ;  at  a  thousand  things  which  an  English 
writer  would  have  left  unsaid  ;  at  the  constant  irruption 
of  the  narrator  into  the  story  ;  the  "  take  it  or  leave  it," 
high-handed  tone  which  he  takes  with  his  readers  ;  at 
the  blatancy  of  the  tricks  he  plays  upon  the  imagina- 
tion— at  a  thousand  little  details. 

Many  quite  acute  critics  never  get  beyond  this  stage, 
and  give  O.  Henry  much  too  short  a  trial,  only  to  turn 
from  him  in  disgust  before  they  penetrate  to  the  real 
writer  at  all.  It  must  be  allowed  at  once  that  the 
pure  gold,  of  which  there  is  much,  is  hidden  beneath  a 
good  deal  of  dross.  There  are  twelve  volumes  of  these 
stories,  and  in  each  volume  there  are  over  two  dozen 
separate  tales.  It  is  not  to  be  expected  that  of  these 
two  hundred  and  seventy  odd  experiments  all  will 
succeed.     I  would  guarantee  to  select  fifty  which  would 


298  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

make  an  irresistible  appeal  to  the  most  exacting  and 
captious  critic,  but  these  fifty  would  have  to  be  chosen 
with  great  circumspection,  and  they  are  to  be  foimd  in 
no  two  or  three  volumes.  They  are  scattered  hap- 
hazard in  between  stories  that  are  merely  dull,  point- 
less or  insipid,  and  to  the  full  appreciation  of  them  a 
knowledge  of  the  salient  points  of  O.  Henry's  life  would 
be  necessary  ;   so  this  I  propose  to  give  now. 

His  biographer,  Professor  Alphonso  Smith,  devotes 
a  great  many  unnecessary  pages  to  his  ancestors  and 
other  irrelevant  matter.  He  has  written  a  book  which 
is  not  at  all  to  be  commended  to  those  who  would 
understand  the  true  Henry,  and  yet  without  it  we 
should  be  apt  to  miss  a  great  deal  that  is  important  if 
we  wish  fully  to  understand  the  appeal  that  his  best 
stories  ought  to  make. 

In  the  first  place,  as  most  people  know,  his  name  was 
not  O.  Henry  at  all,  but  William  Sydney  Porter.  He 
was  born  at  Greensborough,  North  Carolina,  in  1862, 
and  as  a  boy  in  his  native  town  gained  a  good  deal  of 
local  approbation  as  a  cartoonist.  After  leaving  school 
be  became  apprenticed  to  his  uncle,  and  spent  five  years 
in  a  drug  store,  and  completed  his  education  by  reading 
omnivorously.  Among  his  favourite  books  were  The 
Arabian  Xights,  The  Anatomy  of  Melancholy,  the  novels 
of  Scott,  Dickens,  Thackeray,  Charles  Reade,  Bulwer 
Lytton,  Wilkie  Collins,  Victor  Hugo  and  Dumas.  His 
health,  however,  was  not  strong  (he  came  of  a  con- 
sumptive stock),  and  so  at  the  age  of  eighteen  he  was 
sent  to  Texas  in  order  to  learn  the  art  of  ranching. 
His  thirst  for  knowledge  during  this  period  seems  to 
have  been  unquenchable.  History,  fiction,  biography, 
science  and  magazines  of  every  sort  were  devoured  and 
talked  about  with  eager  interest.  Tennyson  and 
Webster's   Unabridged  Dictionary  were  his  two  most 


O.  HENRY  299 

frequent  companions.  Though  he  was  always  shy  and 
somewhat  of  a  dreamer,  he  absorbed,  apparently  with 
little  effort,  the  different  accomplishments  which  he 
was  now  called  upon  to  learn — lassoing  cattle,  dipping 
and  shearing  sheep,  shooting  and  the  management  of 
horses. 

Just  as  the  confinement  in  the  Greensborough  drug 
store  had  whetted  his  appetite  for  the  freedom  of  the 
ranch,  so  now,  after  two  years,  the  isolation  of  ranch  life 
began  to  pall  and  he  became  eager  for  the  social  contact 
of  city  life.  So  he  now  migrated  to  Austin,  where  he 
became,  in  turn,  occasional  clerk  in  a  tobacco  store  and 
later  in  a  drug  store,  book-keeper  for  a  real  estate  firm, 
draftsman  in  a  land  office,  paying  and  receiving  teller 
in  a  bank,  member  of  a  military  company,  singer  in 
the  choirs  of  the  Presbyterian,  Baptist  and  Episcopal 
churches,  actor  in  private  theatricals,  editor  of  a 
humorous  paper,  serenader  and  cartoonist. 

It  was  at  this  time  that  he  acquired  his  lifelong 
taste,  which  was  afterwards  to  stand  him  in  such  good 
stead,  of  going  "  bumming  " — that  is,  of  night-prowling 
in  the  streets.  He  used  to  watch  and  get  into  conversa- 
tion with  every  sort  of  person  in  the  streets,  with  the 
result  that  out  of  work  hours  he  lived  in  a  constant  state 
of  adventure. 

Like  Dostoieffsky  and  all  the  great  Russians,  he  was 
an  incorrigible  romancist,  and  was  always  on  the  look 
out  for  what  was  "  round  the  corner  "  in  life. 

In  1887  he  married  Miss  Athol  Estes,  a  seventeen- 
year-old  girl,  unfortunately,  like  himself,  of  con- 
sumptive parentage.  Owing  to  the  refusal  of  the  girl's 
parents,  on  the  ground  of  health,  to  allow  the  couple  to 
get  married,  they  eloped,  but  were  ultimately  recon- 
ciled. Mrs  Porter  appears  to  have  given  him  exactly 
the  incentive  he  needed.     The  year  of  his  marriage  was 


300  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

also  the  year  in  which  he  began  to  rely  on  his  pen  as 
a  supplementary  source  of  income.  There  was  born 
during  this  period  his  only  daughter,  Margaret  Worth 
Porter,  who  is  now  herself  making  a  name  in  America 
as  an  author. 

In  1894  he  started  a  paper  called  The  Rolling  Stone, 
which  lived  for  exactly  a  year.  He  then  accepted  a 
job  on  the  staff  of  The  Houston  Daily  Post,  which  he 
held  from  October,  1895,  to  June,  1896,  when  he  was 
suddenly  recalled  to  Austin  to  answer  a  charge  of 
embezzlement  while  acting  as  teller  at  the  bank.  That 
he  was  innocent  no  one  now  doubts,  but  he  committed 
what  he  afterwards  called  the  one  irretrievable  error  of 
his  life  by  running  away.  He  took  train  from  Houston, 
obviously  with  the  intent  of  standing  his  trial,  but  at 
Hempstead  his  too  imaginative  mind  betrayed  him,  and 
he  got  out  and  took  the  night  train  to  New  Orleans,  a 
fugitive  from  justice.  He  went  on  by  fruit  steamer  to 
Honduras,  and  there  met  the  leader  of  a  notorious  gang 
of  train  robbers,  whom  he  joined,  and  together  this 
strange  pair  circled  the  entire  west  of  South  America. 
He  wrote  regularly  to  his  wife,  and  was  full  of  plans  for 
the  education  of  his  daughter  in  Honduras,  when 
suddenly  he  learnt  that  his  wife  was  dangerously  ill. 
He  immediately  returned  and  gave  himself  up  in  order 
to  be  near  her.  She  died  in  July,  1897,  and  his  trial 
was  held  in  February  of  the  following  year.  He  pleaded 
not  guilty,  but  appeared  to  be  indifferent  as  to  the  result. 

One  peculiar  feature  of  the  indictment  was  that  he 
was  accused  of  stealing  money  in  November,  1895, 
nearly  a  year  after  he  had  left  the  bank  !  This  appears 
not  to  have  been  commented  on  at  all.  Like  "  Lord 
Jim,"  O.  Henry  appears  to  have  been  crushed  by  his 
one  great  mistake,  in  running  away.  The  rest  of  the 
matter    did    not    appear    to    concern    him.     He    was 


O.  HENRY  301 

sentenced  to  five  years'  imprisonment,  but  came  out  in 
1901,  after  three  years,  owing  to  his  flawless  record  in 
prison.  He  acted  during  these  years  as  drug  clerk 
in  the  penitentiary,  and  Professor  Smith  includes  in 
his  biography  a  great  number  of  letters  written  to  his 
daughter  during  this  time,  over  which  it  is  not  necessary 
now  to  dwell.  He  retained  no  trace  of  bitterness  at  the 
hardness  of  his  lot.  The  years  had  left  an  ineradicable 
mark  upon  his  character,  and  he  came  out  into  the 
world  again  a  changed  man,  nobler,  of  infinite  charity 
and  kindliness,  with  an  intense  sympathy  for  all  his 
fellow-  creatures . 

It  was  at  this  time  that  he  began  to  write  under  an 
assumed  name,  the  name  by  which  he  is  now  known 
to  practically  every  intelligent  person  in  the  English- 
speaking  countries. 

The  stories  that  were  written  in  prison,  under  the 
stress  of  so  great  suffering,  mark  the  transition  from 
journalism  to  the  domain  of  literature  proper. 

In  the  spring  of  1902  came  the  call  to  him  to  go  to 
New  York.  From  that  time  forward  he  found  that  he 
could  not  work  outside  of  the  city  which  he  now  made 
his  own  and  which  claims  him  as  her  most  inspired 
lover.  "  If  ever,"  writes  Professor  Smith,  "  in  American 
literature  the  place  and  the  man  met,  they  met  when 
O.  Henry  strolled  for  the  first  time  along  the  streets 
of  New  York." 

Conqueror-like,  he  began  to  rechristen  the  city  of  his 
choice.  "  Little  Old  Bagdad-on-the-Subway,"  "  The 
City  of  Too  Many  Caliphs,"  "  Noisy  ville  on  the  Hudson," 
"  Wolfville  on  the  Subway  "  and  "  The  City  of  Chame- 
leon Changes"  will  give  some  idea  of  the  impression  this 
vast  Manhattan  made  on  its  greatest  lover.  He  made 
many  and  valuable  friends,  but  was  very  much  averse 
from  any  tendency  that  might  be  shown  to  lionise  him. 


302  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

He  was  nearly  always  penniless,  owing  to  his  lack  of 
thrift  and  his  incurable  habit  of  promiscuous  charity, 
but  he  was  never  tempted  by  golden  offers  to  swell  his 
coffers.  On  one  occasion  a  very  famous  publishing 
firm,  who  had  refused  many  of  his  short  stories  when  he 
was  unknown,  now  came  forward  and  sent  him  a  cheque 
for  a  thousand  dollars,  asking  him  for  something  from 
his  pen — anything.  His  reply  was  to  send  back  the 
cheque  without  further  comment. 

There  were  but  two  things  that  could  be  really 
counted  upon  to  offend  him — a  salacious  story  and  the 
proffer  of  a  plot.  He  preferred  to  get  his  plots  for  him- 
self by  mixing  with  shop  girls  and  salesmen,  by  roaming 
at  all  hours  of  the  day  and  night  along  the  river  front 
and  talking  with  anyone  who  would  condescend  to  do  so. 
He  seems  never  to  have  wanted  "  copy." 

"  If  I  could  have  a  thousand  years,"  he  writes,  in  one 
of  his  short  stories — "  just  one  little  thousand  years — 
more  of  life,  I  might,  in  that  time,  draw  near  enough  to 
true  Romance  to  touch  the  hem  of  her  robe. 

"  Up  from  ships  men  come,  and  from  waste  places, 
and  forest  and  road  and  garret  and  cellar  to  maunder 
to  me  in  strangely  distributed  words  of  the  things  they 
have  seen  and  considered.  The  recording  of  their  tales 
is  no  more  than  a  matter  of  ears  and  fingers.  There 
are  only  two  fates  I  dread — deafness  and  writer's 
cramp." 

To  one  of  his  stories,  Madame  Bo-Peep,  of  the  Ranches, 
he  owes  his  second  wife,  Miss  Sallie  Coleman  of  Asheville, 
North  Carolina.  She  had  written  to  him  about  this 
story  and  told  him  of  her  own  ambition  to  write. 

His  reply  is  illuminating  and  quite  extraordinarily 
helpful,  not  only  to  a  true  understanding  of  the  romantic 
trait  which  is  O.  Henry's  predominant  and  most  charm- 
ing characteristic,  but  also  as  a  piece  of  advice  to  the 


O.  HENRY  303 

thousands  of  young  adventurers  of  to-day  who,  like  the 
cat  in  the  adage,  are  hesitating. 

"  Now  I'll  tell  you  what  to  do,"  he  says.  "  Kick 
the  mountains  over  and  pack  a  kimono  and  a  lead- 
pencil  in  a  suit-case  and  hurry  to  New  York.  Get  a 
little  studio  three  stories  up  with  mission  furniture  and 
portieres,  a  guitar  and  a  chafing-dish  and  laugh  at 
fate  and  the  gods.  There  are  lots  of  lovely  women 
here  leading  beautiful  and  happy  lives  in  the  midst  of 
the  greatest  things  in  this  hemisphere  of  art  and  music 
and  literature,  on  tiny  little  incomes.  You  meet  the 
big  people  in  every  branch  of  art,  you  drink  deep  of 
the  Pierian  spring,  you  get  the  benefit  of  the  earth's 
best." 

Was  ever  good  advice  more  succinctly  or  more 
charmingly  given  ?  It  is  the  root  of  the  whole  matter. 
Seize  your  opportunity,  he  seems  to  say,  in  both 
hands  ;  don't  fear  for  the  result.  Vegetate  no  longer  in 
the  country,  where  your  talents  will  only  run  to  seed, 
but  come  up  to  town,  where  real  life  is  to  be  lived  and 
enjoyed.  Those  only  live  who  are  willing  to  take  the 
risk. 

This  wise  maiden  took  the  risk,  and  in  November,  1907, 
she  became  the  second  Mrs  Porter.  He  now  entered 
upon  his  most  prolific  period. 

In  1904  he  produced  sixty-five,  and  in  1905  fifty 
short  stories.  In  1906  appeared  the  volume  entitled 
The  Four  Millions,  with  this  illuminating  foreword : 

"  Not  very  long  ago  someone  invented  the  assertion 
that  there  were  only  '  Four  Hundred  '  people  in  New 
York  City  who  were  really  worth  noticing.  But  a 
wiser  man  has  arisen — the  census-taker — and  his 
larger  estimate  of  human  interest  has  been  preferred  in 
marking  out  the  field  of  these  little  stories  of  the  ■  Four 
Million.* 


304  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

Here  we  get  the  clue  to  O.  Henry's  greatness,  his 
kinship  with  Dickens  and  Shakespeare  and  all  great 
writers.  He  was  the  born,  large-hearted  democrat  who, 
with  the  utmost  sincerity,  can  lay  his  hand  upon  his 
breast  and  say :  "Humani  nihil  a  me  alienum  puto." 

Each  succeeding  year,  until  1911,  saw  the  publication 
of  two  collections  of  his  stories  touching  on  every  sort 
of  topic,  treating  of  every  kind  of  life. 

In  1909  he  showed  signs  of  breaking  up,  and  in  the 
autumn  of  that  year  he  returned  to  Asheville,  only  to 
return  to  his  beloved  city  in  the  following  March.  On 
the  evening  of  the  3rd  of  June  he  was  taken  to  the 
Polyclinic  Hospital,  and  on  the  following  Sunday 
morning,  just  before  sunrise,  with  a  whimsical  smile 
and  a  jest  upon  his  lips — "  Turn  up  the  lights  :  I  don't 
want  to  go  home  in  the  dark  " — he  died. 

Such  is  the  life  story  of  a  man  who  has  been  variously 
styled  "  The  American  Kipling,"  "  The  American  de 
Maupassant,"  "  The  American  Gogol,"  "  Our  Fielding  a 
la  mode;'  "  The  Bret  Harte  of  the  City,"  "  The  Y.M.C.A. 
Boccaccio,"  "  The  Homer  of  the  Tenderloin,"  "  The 
Twentieth  Century  Haroun  Al-Raschid,"  "  the  Greatest 
Living  Master  of  the  Short  Story." 

It  remains  to  see  how  far  he  has  justified  these  extra- 
ordinary titles. 

First,  then,  as  to  technique. 

No  man  has  made  so  much  his  own  the  art  of  the 
nuexpected  ending.  He  begins  quietly,  yet  arrestingly, 
but  you  are  unable  to  tell  whether  you  are  to  be  let  in 
for  a  tragic  or  comic  denouement,  a  defeat  or  victory. 
In  the  second  stage,  that  of  the  first  guess,  you  begin  to 
discover  the  plot ;  something  definite  and  resultant  seems 
to  be  on  the  way  ;  you  can't  guess  the  end,  but  you 
can't  help  trying  to. 

The  third  stage  shows  you  that  your  guess  was  wrong. 


O.  HENRY  305 

This  is  the  stage  of  the  first  surprise.  Something  has 
happened  that  ought  not  to  have  happened  if  the  story- 
was  to  end  according  to  your  expectations. 

The  last  stage  is  marked  by  light  out  of  darkness. 

"W  e  are  surprised,  happily  surprised,  and  then  surprised 
again  that  we  should  have  been  surprised  at  first. 

He  always  worked  a  triple-hinged  surprise 
To  end  the  scene  and  make  one  rub  one's  eyes. 

The  sting  in  the  tail,  the  entire  volte-face  from  what 
one  expected,  is  amazingly  in  the  vein  of  Rupert  Brooke, 
and  adds  tremendously  to  the  charm  of  the  narrative, 
but  it  is,  after  all,  a  trick,  mechanical  and  often  tiresome 
after  one  gets  accustomed  to  it.  But  there  is  some- 
thing much  deeper  than  this  :  there  is  the  art  which 
yet  makes  the  unexpected  the  inevitable.  You  go  over 
the  stories  a  second  time  and  then  begin  to  perceive  the 
mastery  with  which  the  tricks  are  forged.  It  is  all  of 
a  piece.  There  are  no  loose  ends,  no  irrelevancies. 
All  O.  Henry's  stories  are  marked  by  a  fierce  economy 
of  detail  which  at  once  put  him  on  a  plane  far  different 
from  that  occupied  by  the  average  teller  of  short  stories. 

The  next  point  to  be  noticed  is  his  gift  of  observation 
mingled  with  what  Bagehot  called  the  experiencing 
mind.  Not  only  did  he  watch  with  meticulous  careful- 
ness all  the  idiosyncrasies  of  every  sort  of  person  with 
whom  he  came  into  contact,  but  he  was  further  obsessed 
with  a  passionate  interest  in  and  sympathy  with  every 
type  of  man. 

He  is  particularly  fond  of  turning  the  tables  on 
Haroun  Al-Raschid.  Not  only  does  he  let  the  rich 
wander  incognito  among  the  poor,  but  he  gives  his 
imagination  rein  and,  Pippa-like,  bestows  upon  the 
poverty-stricken  clerk  a  day  when  he  can  become  one 
with  the  rich.  Again  and  again  he  returns  to  this 
u 


306  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

subject,  every  time  to  treat  of  it  from  a  fresh  and 
inspiring  point  of  view. 

We  see  it  in  the  story  of  the  salesman  who  saved  up 
ten  dollars  every  seventy  days  in  order  to  masquerade 
as  a  man  about  town  for  one  night.  He  meets  a  girl 
who  is  masquerading  as  a  shop  girl  for  amusement ; 
he  takes  her  out  to  dinner  and  talks  of  his  bridge  and 
yachts  and  golf  .  .  .  and  other  aimless  amusements  of 
the  life  that  he  pretends  to  belong  to.  They  separate, 
and  we  see  her  at  the  close  of  the  story  lamenting  that 
she  could  find  it  in  her  heart  to  love  a  man  who  was 
chivalrous  and  kind  to  poor  shop  girls,  but  never  one 
who  wasted  his  life  in  expensive  amusements. 

Habit  was  another  favourite  topic.  O.  Henry  was 
very  interested  in  the  question  of  relapse. 

The  Pendulum  is  perhaps  the  best  in  this  vein. 

There  we  have  a  man  who  gets  tired  of  the  monotony 
of  home  life,  and  so  forms  the  habit,  at  eight-fifteen 
every  night,  of  leaving  his  wife  alone  and  going  off  to 
a  game  of  "  pool  "  with  his  male  companions. 

One  night  on  returning  from  work  he  finds  a  note  from 
his  wife  saying  that  she  has  been  called  away  to  see  her 
mother,  who  is  ill.  He  immediately  begins  to  feel 
conscience-stricken ;  he  has  treated  his  wife  abominably. 
^When  she  comes  back  he  will  spend  the  rest  of  his  life  in 
making  up  for  his  desertions.  He  is  ruminating  on  all 
this  when  she  suddenly  returns  ;  her  mother  was  not 
so  bad  as  she  had  been  led  to  expect.  Immediately 
the  husband  looks  up  at  the  clock.  Eight-fifteen !  He 
gets  up,  preparatory  to  leaving  the  house.  Querulously 
his  wife  asks  where  he  is  going.  "  Thought  I'd  drop  up 
to  M'Closkey's,"  he  replied,  "  and  play  a  game  or  two  of 
pool  with  the  fellows." 

But  by  far  the  most  insistent  note  in  O.  Henry's 
stories  is  that  searching  for  what  is  "  round  the  corner," 


O.  HENRY  307 

as  I  indicated  before  :  the  insatiable  thirst  for  romance 
which  every  right-thinking  man  ought  to  encourage. 
44  At  every  corner,"  he  writes,  "  handkerchiefs  drop, 
fingers  beckon,  eyes  besiege,  and  the  lost,  the  lonely, 
the  rapturous,  the  mysterious,  the  perilous,  changing 
clues  of  adventure  are  slipped  into  our  fingers.  But  few 
of  us  are  willing  to  hold  and  follow  them.  We  are  grown 
stiff  with  the  ramrod  of  convention  down  our  backs. 
We  pass  on  ;  and  some  day  we  come,  at  the  end  of 
a  very  dull  life,  to  reflect  that  our  romance  has  been  a 
pallid  thing  of  a  marriage  or  two,  a  satin  rosette  kept  in 
a  safe-deposit  drawer,  and  a  lifelong  feud  with  a  steam 
radiator." 

In  the  story  from  which  this  is  taken  we  have  an  in- 
corrigible romantic  who  is  given,  by  a  negro  in  a  street, 
a  ticket  with  "  The  Green  Door  "  written  on  it.  He 
passes  him  again  in  the  crowd,  and  is  again  given  a 
ticket  with  the  same  name  on  it.  He  enters  the  house 
opposite  which  the  negro  is  standing,  and  upstairs  finds 
a  door  of  the  right  colour,  opens  it,  and  finds  a  pretty 
shop  girl  fainting  for  want  of  food.  This  he  instantly 
procures  for  her,  and  promises  to  come  and  see  her 
again.  As  he  goes  out  he  notices  that  all  the  doors  in 
the  house  are  painted  green.  He  accosts  the  negro 
outside  and  asks  him  why  he  gave  him  the  ticket.  The 
negro  points  down  the  street  to  a  neighbouring  theatre, 
over  which  is  flashed  out  the  title  of  the  play  then 
running,  The  Green  Door. 

Another  favourite  theme  is  Destiny. 

1  go  to  seek  on  many  roads 
What  is  to  be. 
True  heart  and  strong,  with  love  to  light — 
Will  they  not  hear  me  in  the  fight 
To  order,  shun  or  wield  or  mould 
My  Destiny  ? 


308  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

The  answer  is :  No.  Destiny  awaits  you.  You 
cannot  "  order,  shun  or  wield  or  mould  "it. 

"  It  ain't  the  roads  we  take  :  it's  what's  inside  of  us 
that  makes  us  turn  out  the  way  we  do." 

But  Henry's  true  venturer  dares  Fate  in  its  blindest 
manifestations :  the  true  venturer  does  not  ask  a 
schedule  and  map  from  Fate  when  he  begins  a  journey. 
What  he  wants  is  to  encounter  an  adventure  to  which 
he  can  predict  no  conclusion. 

But  he  attains  the  topmost  pinnacle  of  his  fame  only 
when  he  writes  about  the  shop  girl.  It  is  as  the  little 
shop  girl's  true  knight-errant  that  O.  Henry  stands 
most  vividly  before  us. 

Of  all  social  problems  (and  social  problems  were  the 
very  life  blood  of  O.  Henry),  that  of  the  conditions  under 
which  the  shop  girl  lives,  and  of  her  outlook  on  life, 
interested  him  most. 

In  A  Lickpenny  Lover  we  see  her,  beautiful,  shrewd, 
cunning,  with  vision  limited  behind  the  counter  in  a 
glove  store.  To  her  comes  Irving  Carter,  painter, 
millionaire,  gentleman,  and  falls  immediately  in  love 
with  her.  Summoning  up  courage,  he  suggests  that  he 
should  call  on  her  people. 

"Carter  did  not  know  the  shop  girl.  He  did  not 
know  that  her  home  is  often  either  a  scarcely  habitable 
tiny  room  or  a  domicile  filled  to  overflowing  with  kith 
and  kin.  The  street-corner  is  her  parlour,  the  park  is 
her  drawing-room  ;  the  avenue  is  her  garden  walk  ;  yet 
for  the  most  part  she  is  as  inviolate  mistress  of  herself 
in  them  as  is  my  lady  inside  her  tapestried  chamber." 

He  meets  her  in  the  streets  and  implores  her  to  marry 
him,  drawing  a  perfect  picture  of  Venice  and  India, 
Persia  and  the  ends  of  the  earth  to  which  he  will  take 
her. 

To  her  bosom  friend  next  she  recounted  the  episode. 


O.  HENRY  309 

"  Say,  Lu,  what  do  you  think  that  fellow  wanted  me 
to  do  ?  He  wanted  me  to  marry  him  and  go  down  to 
Coney  Island  for  a  wedding  tour." 

In  Elsie  in  New  York  we  have  the  story  of  a  girl  look- 
ing for  work,  who  is  met  on  the  threshold  of  each  place 
by  some  self-styled  charity  organisation  which  prevents 
her  from  accepting  without  providing  her  with  anything 
else.  In  the  end  she  falls  a  victim  to  the  worst  type  of 
scoundrel. 

In  The  Guilty  Party  Liz  is  driven  to  the  streets  and 
ruin  simply  because  her  father  would  do  nothing  to 
make  her  home  attractive  for  her. 

An  Unfinished  Story  dwells  on  the  underpayment  of 
working  girls  and  their  ultimate  ruin  owing  to  their 
quite  natural  love  of  adornment.     It  finishes  thus  : 

"  I  dreamed  that  I  was  standing  near  a  crowd  of 
prosperous-looking  angels,  and  a  policeman  took  me  by 
the  wing  and  asked  if  I  belonged  to  them. 

" '  Who  are  they  ?  '  I  asked. 

"'Why,'  said  he,  'they  are  the  men  who  hired 
working  girls,  and  paid  'em  five  or  six  dollars  a  week 
to  live  on.     Are  you  one  of  the  bunch  ?  ' 

"  '  Not  on  your  immortality,'  said  I.  'I'm  only  the 
fellow  that  set  fire  to  an  orphan  asylum,  and  murdered 
a  blind  man  for  his  pennies.'  " 

In  Brickdust  Row  we  are  reminded  of  Shaw  in 
Widowers'  Houses.  The  shaft  is  aimed  at  those  who 
compel  girls  to  meet  men  on  the  boats,  in  church, 
in  the  park  or  on  the  street. 

"  A  girl  has  got  to  meet  the  men,"  says  Florence  to 
the  man  who  has  fallen  in  love  with  her  but  doesn't 
understand  the  sort  of  life  she  is  forced  to  live  ;  "  the 
first  time  one  spoke  to  me  on  the  street,  I  ran  home  and 
cried  all  night.  But  you  get  used  to  it.  I  meet  a  good 
many  nice  fellows  at  church." 


310  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

The  hero  finds  that  he  owns  the  very  block  of  flats 
in  which  the  girl  lives.  His  lawyer  suggests  making 
reception  rooms. 

"  Man,"  replies  the  agonised  lover,  "  it's  too  late,  I 
tell  you.     It's  too  late.     It's  too  late.     It's  too  late." 

In  The  Trimmed  Lamp  we  see  two  shop  girls  and  the 
devoted  lover.  One  of  the  girls,  caring  only  for  ostenta- 
tion and  finery,  throws  him  over,  and  he  mates  with  the 
other.  At  the  end  we  are  shown  the  flashy  girl,  led 
astray  by  baubles,  expensively  clad,  with  diamond  rings 
and  all  the  paraphernalia  of  her  new  profession,  crouch- 
ing down  by  a  dark  fence,  sobbing,  with  a  plainly  dressed 
working  girl  by  her  side  who  was  doing  her  best  to 
console  her. 

Another  main  feature  of  O.  Henry  is  his  study  of 
cities. 

"  He  studied  cities  as  women  study  their  reflections  in 
mirrors  :  a  city  was  a  thing  with  a  soul,  an  individual 
conglomeration  of  life,  with  its  own  peculiar  essence, 
flavour  and  feeling,"  he  says  of  Raggles,  in  The  Making 
of  a  Xew  Yorker,  "  Chicago  seemed  to  swoop  down 
upon  him  with  a  breezy  suggestion  of  Mrs  Partington, 
plumes  and  patchouli,  Pittsburg  impressed  him  as  the 
play  of  Othello  performed  in  Russian  in  a  railroad  station 
by  Dockstader's  minstrels.  Xew  Orleans  simply  gazed 
down  upon  him  from  a  balcony,  Boston  seemed  to  him  a 
white,  cold  cloth  that  had  been  bound  tightly  round 
his  brow  to  spur  him  on  to  some  unknown  but 
tremendous  mental  effort." 

New  York  seemed  to  ignore  him  altogether  until  he 
had  been  knocked  down  by  a  motor  car,  when  he  dis- 
covered how,  underneath  the  surface,  she  stood  kindly, 
human,  sympathetic,  a  veritable  mother  city. 

In  A  Municipal  Report,  which  Professor  Leacock 
admires  more  than  all  his  other  stories,  he  tries  to  show 


O.  HENRY  311 

that  romance  may  be  found  in  even  the  dullest  and  most 
unlikely  remote  corners  of  the  globe.  In  Nashville, 
Tennessee,  he  found  the  most  romantic  story  he  ever 
wrote.     To  the  seeing  eye  all  cities  are  story  cities. 

He  has  painted  for  us  Latin  America,  the  South,  the 
West  and  the  North,  all  with  consummate  skill ;  his 
sense  of  atmosphere  is  as  sure  as  his  sense  of  romance, 
satire  or  humour,  on  all  three  of  which  he  is  a  past 
master. 

He  is  as  happy  in  his  description  of  the  land  of  the 
lotus-eaters,  where  "  The  climate  was  as  balmy  as  that 
of  distant  Avalon  ;  the  fetterless,  idyllic  round  of  en- 
chanted days  ;  the  life  of  the  indolent,  romantic  people 
— a  life  full  of  music,  flowers,  and  low  laughter  ;  the 
influence  of  the  imminent  sea  and  mountains,  and  the 
many  shapes  of  love  and  magic  and  beauty  that  bloomed 
in  the  white  tropic  nights,"  as  he  is  in  his  truer  home 
of  Wall  Street,  where  harassed  brokers  are  so  busy 
that  they  even  forget  that  they  are  married  the  day 
after. 

Whether  the  air  was  languorous  with  the  scent  of 
jasmine  and  orange  blossoms,  or  cold  and  dank,  as  in 
Manhattan,  he  was  equally  able  to  make  it  live  again  in 
the  pages  of  his  books,  so  that  you  are  transported  there 
in  a  moment  and  feel  the  very  climatic  conditions  as 
you  read.  Like  our  own  English  humorist,  now,  alas  ! 
dead  (Mr  H.  H.  Munro),  he  had  the  gift  of  exactly 
fitting  his  characters  with  apt  names. 

Who  does  not  conjure  up  at  once  an  exact  vision  of 
Don  Senor  el  Coronel  Encarnacion  Rios,  Monteleon  y 
Dolorosa  de  los  Santos  y  Mendez,  or  John  de  Graffen- 
reid  Atwood,  from  their  names  alone  ? 

He  is  for  ever  bursting  out  into  the  ridiculous,  strain- 
ing humour  beyond  the  bounds  to  which  we  as  a  nation 
allow  it  to  stretch,  as  in  "  Omnia  Gallia  in  tres  partes 


312  STUDIES  IN  LITERATURE 

divisa  est :  which  is  the  same  as  to  say ;  we  will  need  all 
of  our  gall  in  devising  means  to  tree  them  parties.'' 

Again  he  lets  slip  from  time  to  time,  usually  apropos 
of  nothing,  little  passages  of  philosophy  which,  once 
read,  we  are  likely  to  carry  with  us  to  the  grave.  Of 
these  the  one  that  I  remember  most  clearly  runs  thus  : 
c  You  can't  write  with  ink,  and  you  can't  write  with 
your  own  heart's  blood,  but  you  can  write  with  the 
heart's  blood  of  someone  else.  You  have  to  be  a  cad 
before  you  can  be  an  artist." 

In  The  Country  of  Elusion  we  see  his  hatred  of  the 
sham  Bohemia  of  the  New  Yorker. 

"  You  know  how  the  Bohemian  feast  of  reason  keeps 
up  with  the  courses.  Humour  with  the  oysters  ;  wit 
with  the  soup  ;  repartee  with  the  entree  ;  brag  with 
the  roast ;  knocks  for  Whistler  and  Kipling  with  the 
salad  ;  songs  with  the  coffee  :  the  slapsticks  with  the 
cordials.  Freedom  is  the  Tyrant  that  holds  our 
Bohemians  in  slavery." 

I  notice  that  no  writer  on  O.  Henry  dares  to  conclude 
without  asserting  violently  his  preference  for  one  story 
over  the  rest.  Perhaps  so  great  a  choice  (out  of  two 
hundred  and  seventy)  eggs  one  on  to  do  a  thing  like  this. 
Anyway,  I  will  try  my  hand  at  the  game  too.  For 
pure  humour  I  place  Let  Me  Feel  Your  Pulse  easily 
first.  It  has  an  appeal  which  none  of  the  others  has 
for  the  purely  English  reader.  It  is  freer  of  exaggerated 
jargon  ;  it  is  purer  in  style  (O.  Henry  was  no  stylist, 
at  any  rate,  in  diction),  and  has,  as  all  good  humorous 
stories  should  have,  a  quite  pregnant  climax.  It  obeys 
the  laws  laid  down  by  Meredith  for  the  Comic  Spirit : 
it  makes  us  laugh  at  human  follies  ;  it  satirises  and 
ridicules  and  yet  it  does  us  quite  active  and  appreciable 
good.  It  is  an  anodyne  in  itself  for  all  bodily  ailments, 
an  infallible  prescription  from  an  unerring  doctor. 


O.  HENRY  313 

For  pathos  I  place  The  Furnished  Room  and  Past 
One  at  Rooneifs  as  exquisite  examples  of  what  drama 
it  is  possible  to  convey  through  the  medium  of  the 
short  story,  and  for  a  picture  of  the  life  which  0.  Henry 
was  most  fond  of,  that  of  the  New  York  shop  girl,  I 
think  most  readers  might  wander  farther  and  fare  worse 
than  contenting  themselves  with  The  Third  Ingredient, 
but  all  of  the  stories  which  I  have  mentioned  are  of  the 
kind  that  one  reads  only  to  reread  with  greater  enjoy- 
ment every  time  one  comes  back  to  them. 

That  O.  Henry  is  one  of  the  world's  great  geniuses 
is  probably  not  true.  That  he  was  a  vastly  diverting 
raconteur,  poignant  in  his  pathos,  terrible  in  his  tragedy, 
witty,  urbane  and  kindly  in  his  humour,  is  an  estab- 
lished fact  which  no  sane  critic  can  deny.  Luckily 
(for  us)  his  reputation  is  growing  day  by  day,  and 
whether  the  whole  English-speaking  world  come  to 
recognise  in  him  one  of  the  greatest  masters  or  not,  the 
time  is  surely  not  far  distant  when  everyone  will  get  to 
know  him  well  enough  to  offer  up  a  prayer  of  gratitude 
that  we  should  have  been  privileged  to  come  under 
the  influence  of  so  eminently  sane,  human,  and  healthy 
a  writer. 


UNIVERSITY  OF  N.C.  AT  CHAPEL  HILL 


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